tag:open.umn.edu,2005:/oen/blog?page=7Open Education Network Blog2022-01-14T18:50:02Zhttps://open.umn.edu/assets/common/favicon/favicon-1594c2156c95ca22b1a0d803d547e5892bb0e351f682be842d64927ecda092e7.icohttps://open.umn.edu/assets/common/oen_logo-8333e15dfea29982154feac5548a2c83e2deb688d477f3e84686d42ad1e57fb2.pngtag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/442021-12-10T12:00:00Z2022-04-06T15:11:47ZOEN at Open Publishing Fest: Launching a Grant-Funded Open Textbook Program<div><em>Watch the </em><a href="https://youtu.be/koWi9-s_VjY"><em>video recording</em></a><em> of this Open Publishing Fest 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 transcripts is also available below.</em></div><div><br></div><div><strong>Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please </strong><a href="mailto:joh20849@umn.edu"><strong>contact Tonia</strong></a><strong>.</strong></div><h2>Audio Transcript</h2><div><strong>Open Publishing Fest: Launching a Grant-Funded Open Textbook Program</strong></div><div><strong>Speakers:</strong></div><ul><li>Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)</li><li>Amanda Hurford (Scholarly Communications Director, PALNI)</li><li>Jennifer Coronado (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Butler University)</li><li>Erin Milanese (Affordable Learning Project Coordinator, PALNI)</li></ul><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Hello! Welcome to the Open Publishing Fest. My name is Karen Lauritsen. I am the publishing director with the Open Education Network. I’m joined today by Barb Thees, our community manager. And if you are not already familiar with the Open Education Network, or OEN for short, we’re a community of higher ed professionals working together to make education more equitable through open education. We’re based at the University of Minnesota in the United States. And you can learn more about us at <a href="https://open.umn.edu/oen/">open.umn.edu/oen</a>.</div><div>Today we’re talking with Amanda Hurford who is the Scholarly Communications Director at PALNI, and PALNI stands for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana. She is joined by Jennifer Coronado who is Scholarly Communication Librarian at Butler University, part of PALNI, and Erin Milanese who is Affordable Learning Project Coordinator at PALNI. They are going to talk together about how they launched their first grant funded open textbook creation grants program.</div><div>I prepared several questions for the PALNI team, but your questions are welcomed and encouraged so please feel free to put them in the chat as they occur to you. There will also be plenty of time at the end for you to unmute or put them in the chat then. Really, our conversation is intended to be informal. I don’t think anyone has slides prepared. We just want to chat about all things OER publishing. So this is modeled after some tea time meetings that we have in the publishing cooperative where we talk about whatever’s on our mind and not necessarily things that we have figured out either.</div><div>So before we get started I’d like to share a few housekeeping details. Live transcription has been enabled. If you’re not seeing it please let us know. We are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all attendees. So please join us in creating that safe and constructive space. We are, as you know, recording the session. It will be available shortly on the OEN YouTube channel and also archived with the Open Publishing Fest.</div><div>Okay. That concludes our preamble. Now is the time to start chatting. So, first question for our guests, please tell us a little bit about PALNI and how it’s structured.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Okay, I can take that one. So as Karen mentioned, PALNI is the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, and we are a library consortium of 23 institutions all across Indiana from the most northern part to the most southern part. And all of our institutions are small private colleges. Our largest institution I believe is Butler, which Jennifer is a staff member of, and that is around 5,000 FTE.</div><div>And PALNI itself has a small full-time staff, including me, and I work on a variety of scholarly communications projects as the scholarly communications director. And we also have a number of coordinators who are part-time and do more focused work, more project specific work on things like affordable learning and that’s Erin’s role as our affordable learning project coordinator. And PALNI is rooted in deep collaboration. So what we do as a consortium is we connect folks from all across of our supported institutions to work together on problems that everyone faces to kind of make the problem smaller by having more hands in it to figure out how to attack things.</div><div>So, we have a number of task forces and ongoing committees that we work with at PALNI, and that’s how this program got started. We had an Affordable Learning Committee, I want to say back in 2017 or 2018, where we started talking about all of this and the publishing program just kind of ended up being an evolution of that work. Another one thing I wanted to mention about PALNI and this project is that it’s supported by a grant that we got from the Lilly Endowment for $520,000. So that’s how we’ve been able to fund not only the publishing program that we have, but also stipends for reviews and course redesigns and things like that.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thanks, Amanda. So you mentioned that you were all on an Affordable Learning Committee. Can you say more about how the three of you specifically became collaborators on this project?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> I could probably tackle that a little bit because when Amanda had started the Affordable Education Committee it was a smaller group. And then we decided to branch it and make it a little bit larger and pull in additional people to create PALSAVE, which is kind of like our overarching admin team for anything related to affordable education. So it kind of encompassed, you know, course redesigns, OERs, and then with that, Butler, we had some interest in doing publications and textbook creation and it was something that Amanda was interested in also, developing that kind of arm of PALSAVE. And then Erin was brought on as our coordinator, but she had originally started at Goshen. So it just kind of happened to fall in, you know, the three of us had interests in getting something like this off the ground.</div><div>And so, you know, part of Butler, I had a faculty member who was very much a go-getter in all things, everything. And so we used him to kind of be a pilot member of this. And so he was very easy going. He had an idea of what he wanted to have happen, so we were able to kind of use him as a pilot. And so, you know, he understood that he was going to essentially be a guinea pig for this and was very much open to that.</div><div>So, because I had this connection, it kind of allowed us to play with some of the things that we wanted to achieve and make sure we kind of ironed out some wrinkles before we went ahead and did a full call for proposals for all of the funding we could give for our textbook creation. So it just kind of fell into, the three of us were the ones who were most interested in developing out this idea.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> And just to follow up on that, Jennifer, so it sounds like you were working with one faculty member, like you said, to kind of pilot things before you launched officially. How long was that period?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> Well, it’s still ongoing. He has not finalized a book yet. We kind of did it in a staggered motion. So, you know, we did a lot of that pre-development and figuring out timelines and papers and documentation. So we’d figured that out, worked with him to kind of give him some of these pre-documents that we had created, and essentially he’s maybe about six months ahead of where our current authors are.</div><div>So right now he’s in the peer review stage, whereas our other authors are still in the writing stage. So he’s only slightly ahead of everybody else. We knew we couldn’t do an entire, you know, two- to three-year textbook and then start on everybody else. So he just happened to start a little bit earlier than everybody else. So we’re seeing how, we’re still, what is it, the expression? We’re flying the plane as we’re building it? So that’s a little bit of how our approach has been.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> But you have excellent…I’m trying to extend the metaphor, GPS? Goggles? I don’t know, vision?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> Yes! Engineers, all of it, yes.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. So how did each of you define your roles and responsibilities in this grant program?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Yeah, I’ll take that one. It wasn’t really anything formal. It was more just who has the time and interest and also thinking about our respective roles. So like Jen said, she was the one at Butler working, so she sort of became the project manager working with the author because that’s what made sense for her to do. And Amanda, as a scholarly communications director for PALNI handled a lot of things that are kind of at that director level. And so, yeah, it was just sort of who has time and interest and also thinking about what our designated roles were for PALNI and our organizations.</div><div>In terms of interest, things like, one of Jen’s random skills is redesigning documents to be really pretty, so she took that on. And like, in my life outside of PALNI, I do a lot in instructional tech, so anything that was sort of, like when we needed to figure out how H5P works in Pressbooks, I sort of volunteered to do that, ’cause that’s sort of a hat I wear. So yeah, nothing really formal, but that’s sort of how we define who would do what.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thanks. So can you talk a little bit, Jen, you mentioned some things with your solo faculty author kind of paving the way and then launching the full program. Can all of you, or whoever, please talk a little bit more about how you prepared to launch? So, you haven’t done the official thing yet. What went into that process?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Yeah, and I think we will all chime in on this one. I can start. One of the first things we did and I handled a lot of this, was just, we did a ton of research and like looking at what everyone else had done. So, attending things like this and hearing from people who were a bit ahead of us in launching their own publishing programs. And we all did the PUB101 course, which was really helpful. And we talked to people. I sent a lot of emails to other consortia to see how they had done this at that scale.</div><div>And in particular, I want to shout-out Stephanie at the VIVA Consortia in Virginia, who sent me multiple emails and talked to me on the phone and just gave, sent us a ton of their documents so that we weren’t starting at like square one. We were starting at like square four, which was just really amazing. So if any of you are at that point where you’re like, how do I even start? Just ask people for their stuff because they will give it to you. This is such a welcoming community that’s so willing to share. So that was sort of my role at the beginning was doing a lot of that research and sort of getting us some documents to start with.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> Right, and then once we kind of got those documents, then it was a matter of, okay, how do we repurpose those to fit our needs? Because you know, we were working with, you know, private institutions and, you know, things work a little bit differently than, you know, maybe like for more public institutions, so it was a lot of redoing some of those documents.</div><div>And like I said earlier, we had most of our documentation already done before our call for proposal ever went out. So we had done our lead author agreements, timelines. If our authors were, you know, working with third-party people on some of their books, we had agreements for those. We had the applications already, you know, completed, along with like the call for proposal. All that documentation, all that verbiage, everything for marketing, we had all those things pretty much sorted out before we even launched our call for proposal.</div><div>Actually, to be honest, we had also our rubric for how we were going to assess the applications that came in. All those things were done first because those were the things that we were also sharing as part of our call for proposal so that our faculty who were interested in applying, they knew the types of things that we were going to be looking at, some of the things that we, you know, ranked a little bit higher than others. So, we had all that documentation available for people to look at before we, pretty much once we launched it, all that documentation was done.</div><div>And I will say in terms of our timeline, we had to pretty much work backwards. You know, we knew that based on our grant, things had to be done, you know, 2023, 2024. Things had to be wrapped up by then. So from there it was, alright, how much time do we need to leave for cover creation? How much time do we need to leave for copy editing, peer review? How much time do they need to actually write the thing? So you kind of had to work your way backwards to figure out, “Oh, shoot. We were supposed to launch our call for proposals last week, probably.” So figuring out that timeline was very important and it actually has helped us stay on schedule.</div><div>And I think also, I would say, is making sure that you allot more time than you think is necessary. So I think that’s one of the things that we’re starting to learn right now as we kind of fall into peer review timeline for our pilot person, but it was very helpful. Like, and Amanda probably can speak to this in a little bit, but you know, in our lead author agreements, we clearly defined the things that we said that we would do as PALNI support. We would make sure that copy editing was done and the textbook cover creation, like those were the types of things that we were ready to support.</div><div>And then we had an outline of responsibilities of authors so that everybody was clearly designated as to what we expected of them and then what they can expect of us. So I think that kind of helped our authors understand, you know, what was on their plate and what they could expect, and what were the things that we are going to help kind of take off of their plate that they didn’t have to worry about.<br><br></div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> I’ll just kind of wrap up this topic. As Erin and Jennifer mentioned, we did want to do as much preparing as we could and being as organized as we could. I think partly to kind of combat the, maybe the imposter syndrome that we were feeling a bit about publishing and the fact that we had never done this before.</div><div>A good way for me to always feel better about something that I’ve never done before is to over-prepare and just feel like I can draw from the resources that are available to me to be as ready as I can for whatever comes up. So I feel like we really did that. Before the pandemic hit, right before the pandemic hit, like late 2019, we spent a whole day at Butler in this little office, which sounds, I don’t know, maybe not that fun. But it was great because we ordered lunch and we just, you know, we spread out all of our papers and I think we even called into one of the tea times from the OEN Publishing Co-Op to learn about copyrights.</div><div>And we just really sorted through all of the details and we made a plan to make all of the different documents that we needed to make. And I feel like having that dedicated organization time and delegation time, and just having the three of us who were really taking on the responsibility of all of the different pieces, and having that core group has really been the best thing that we could do to prepare.</div><div>I will mention also that we, in thinking about reviewing our proposals, we added a fourth person to our team in order to help with those reviews, and we set aside some dedicated time in order to review the proposals when they came in. But we’ll talk a little bit more about what we did in order to review in a moment.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you all. It really sounds like you had the time and space to kind of, probably thanks in large part to the grant funding, to think about how you wanted to do this. And there’s always so many benefits to, like you said, Amanda, planning especially if you feel like I haven’t done this before, I’m really going to plan this extra hard with many steps. And I think that can really help clarify for ourselves, for myself, as well as help with the communication stage when you are reaching out to authors. Like Jennifer was saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do.” You can’t know that until you really sort of map all of it out.</div><div>So you spend this time in the office. You order lunch. Good things are happening. A pandemic happens, and then you launch your call for proposals. What did you hope to accomplish? How did that timing workout? Did you have specific metrics like, “Gosh, I hope we get X number of applicants.” Or “I hope they’re from these disciplines.” What was that like?</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Sure, I can take that one. So we didn’t really have a whole lot of expectations going into our call for proposals. We knew what our final goal was, which was to do what we said we were going to do in our grant application, which was to publish five open textbooks by the end of our grant cycle, which ends in 2024.</div><div>So, we were just crossing our fingers that we got at least five applications. And we really wanted to make sure that we had enough applications, enough quality applications, to satisfy that grant requirement. And then also, you know, just that it was a good pool of, you know, diverse projects, interesting projects, things that we thought we could handle. So we were just kind of hoping that the ones that came in would be right for us.</div><div>And we also really wanted to just determine interest. Like I said, we had no idea if we would have even enough applications to do what we set out to do. You know, we wanted to find out are PALNI faculty even interested in writing textbooks? We hadn’t really heard a whole lot of indication one way or another other than, you know, when we would do our workshops, letting faculty know about OER, every once in a while, we’d get the question of like, “Well, what do I do if there’s nothing in my subject area?” And we’d be like, “Why don’t you write a textbook?” And they’d be like, “Okay!” So we didn’t really know what the interest was.</div><div>And then, you know, also just out of curiosity, again, do PALNI faculty have the capacity to write a textbook and will they even apply? So I definitely think that we were excited and impressed and surprised by the outcome that we did ultimately have.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Related to that, about, you mentioned that Lilly wanted five by 2024. Did you have a sense of how many projects you could support and exactly how you could support it beyond that five? Like, “Oh, if we get 20, we’re going to take on 20!” Or was it, how did you sort that out?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Well, funny that you chose 20 because that is exactly how many we ended up getting. I guess 21, if we include our pilot project. We, as has been mentioned, PALNI schools are small and the majority of people that work for us on PALSAVE, or really on any PALNI committee, are volunteers. So with that in mind, we kind of knew we couldn’t take on a whole lot more, but also in terms of funding.</div><div>So we did end up, one, I guess, advantage of COVID is that we were able to move some grant money that had been allocated for like going to conferences and things like that, that just ended up not happening, we were able to repurpose some of that money to allow us to accept five projects from the pool of 20, so we are doing six. So, we have the five from the 20 and then the pilot. So we did take on one more.</div><div>And for those we are doing, like Jen talked about a little bit earlier, like those are the ones that we’re really like supporting copy editing and doing a cover, really paying them money. Like there’s just a lot more going on for those.</div><div>And then we talked a lot about what a second tier of support could look like because there were so many good projects that we had to say, no or sorry, we can’t give you the grant. But we did give everyone the option to use Pressbooks. So that’s sort of our second tier, but there’s not really any formal support. Like we can help you maybe get your Pressbooks account set up and give you some basics, but we’re not doing copy editing, we’re not designing a cover, like those sorts of things for those other books. Yeah, so that’s sort of our extra tier, but yeah.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Did anyone take you up on it?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Yes, actually! If you go to, I think Amanda may have put the PALNI press link in there, but we do have, I think two books up there now that were just people who were interested in creating a book, and so they did. And we’ve had a lot of other people express interest in that, and I think in early 2022, we might try and do a workshop for faculty on just like how to use Pressbooks.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> But those two were pretty self-sufficient. It sounds like there wasn’t a lot of Pressbooks support.</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Yeah. We’ve been surprised at how some faculty are really like, they don’t even ask a question. We give them the login information and next thing we know they’ve got a textbook on there.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Well, I just wanted to follow up on one point on that. So we do have Pressbooks that we’re offering out to the entire PALNI community, not just for the purposes of creating an open textbook. So the link that I just shared has three books, and one of them is already in the Open Textbook Library with two reviews, which is super exciting because we literally didn’t have to invest any energy at all in getting that textbook off and running. And then the other two are more sort of like scholarly publications, but one of them was actually used in the course at one of the PALNI schools. So it’s not necessarily a book that’s organized like a textbook per se, but it was used for that purpose.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Great. I really appreciate how all of you are talking about sort of different publishing models depending on different scales. So somebody listening who might be a one-person program could think about, well, is there a way we provide, for example, access to Pressbooks or another tool, or, you know, copyright consultation, whatever is sort of scalable to them as an individual. </div><div>And then we’re going all the way to sort of generously funded grant program where there’s also, you know, peer review, cover design, copy editing, so there’s so much room in there to experiment and find and define your support. So these six projects, or maybe five is more applicable to this next question, how did you select those five from the 20? How did you make that tough decision?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> Sure.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> You mentioned a rubric.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> Mm-hmm. So we were very excited that, like I said, we had 20 and we were really hoping that we would get five. So it was really nice that we had that opportunity to really dig in and see what we had. And as Amanda mentioned earlier, we added a fourth person to help during the review because, you know, we asked for, you know, a pretty lengthy application. It went into how do you foresee yourself finishing and writing this book and please provide us, you know, a sample chapter or a sense of a table of contents, and it was a pretty involved application, and so we knew between the three of us, we were really worried about that sense of fatigue.</div><div>So we had a rubric, and within that rubric, we were really looking at how well do they adhere to the rubric? Because like I said, it was part of the call for proposal documentation that they all had access to when we sent out the call. So it was something they could look at and, you know, try and make sure they adhere to a lot of the pieces. And so we basically were looking at how well did they fill out these questions and give us a good sense of where they’re coming from and things like that.</div><div>And so we, all four of us, looked at every single project. But one of the things I think that we did, that if we were to do this again, we’ll definitely do it this way, because we staggered who started where in looking at the applications. Not everybody started with the first one, and then everybody ended on the last one, because you know, that first one is going to be, “Oh, this is great.” But then by the time you get to the end, you’re so tired of looking at anything that you’re just like, “Ugh, I don’t want to look at this anymore.”</div><div>So by having everybody start in different places of looking at the applications, it really helped reduce that sense of fatigue, and we didn’t want to, you know, have that all dumped on the last person. And so I thought that was a great way that we handled it.</div><div>But one of the things that we were looking at as well, aside from how well they adhere to the rubric, was looking at the diversity of authors. We wanted to make sure we weren’t just giving funds to every white man writing about a STEM field. We were looking at ways, how can we increase the diversity of our authors, the subject matter.</div><div>And then, because, you know, we are PALNI, we’re private academics, we wanted to try and touch on some of those more niche topics that not everybody’s going to get a textbook funded to write about, especially when we hit things like religion and music, some of those topics that, you know, we don’t need another economics, you know, Intro to Economics . There are plenty of those out there that people can put together. But what are some of those a little bit more niche topics that maybe there aren’t as many materials out there for.</div><div>So we are definitely wanting to, you know, create a little bit more of a well rounded sense of who and what was being funded. And I think in the next iteration, if we get to have one, we wanted to put a little bit more emphasis on DEI type subjects, or applications that include a little bit more of a DEI focus. So, you know, the ones that stood out to us were those applications that included some of those topics, and so I think in the future, if we’re able to do this again, we would like to include that a little bit more heavily and a little bit more focused in the rubric itself.<br><br></div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. I was just reading the chat where Amanda dropped in the rubric and Jennifer, you were talking about wanting a diverse pool of authors and wanting them to incorporate topics of equity and inclusion in the work. And Linda has a question here about why that wasn’t included in this first draft of the rubric, which I haven’t looked at, so I’m not sure if it’s there or if you’d like to, if it is there, and you’d like to emphasize it more.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> I mean, to be honest, I think at the time we just hadn’t maybe thought of it entirely and it wasn’t until we were looking at applications that included it that we realized those were the ones that we were gravitating towards. And so for the next iteration, it was just a sense of, we need to make sure that we do include this the next time, because we found it to be so valuable.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. Any surprises in the applications or anything that we’ve talked about up to this point where you’re like, “Wow, we did not expect that to take this long,” for example, or any surprises you can think of?</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Well, I can think of a couple to share. And I think the first one was just how many replies that we got, how many applications that we had come in. Jen mentioned we were hoping for five and we kind of joked around about how, like we hoped we literally got five so that we didn’t have to say no to anybody. But actually it was pretty great that we did get as many as we did just to establish that there was such a great interest in authoring textbooks across PALNI schools.</div><div>So we’ve got a good reason to move forward in requesting more funds from Lilly, which they’ve indicated that they’re potentially considering funding a second round. So that’s really exciting because we reported back to them in our last grant report the interest that we had, and the fact that we would love to continue this as an ongoing program.</div><div>We were really surprised at the variety of topics that we got, but overall, I would say that having the pilot project with James has helped us to be kind of not too surprised as we’re going through the process, which is great. Since we’re new with this, jumping in with two feet on, you know, five different projects and realizing, “Oh no, we’ve made a mistake. We should have reconfigured this or reworded this, or taken a different approach on this or that.” By working through the process with James, it’s been a lot easier.</div><div>And I would say the biggest thing that we were surprised about is that James has been, sorry, James McGrath, the author of our pilot textbook, he’s been really excited to work directly in Pressbooks, which was something that we didn’t really think that faculty would be interested in because it’s, you know, just something else to learn. Who has time to build a new authoring platform? I know it took me a while to carve out the time in order to really get into it. So we were thinking that all of our authors would want to work directly in Word or Google docs or something like that, and would be happy just to pass on the manuscript.</div><div>But no, James really wanted to work in Pressbooks and get used to that interface, I think because he wanted to go ahead and make a draft available to his students and have it be a working draft and not just this sort of, you know, black hole that his draft goes into while it goes through copy editing and peer review and all of the processes that we’re putting it in. He wants that draft to be something that’s valuable and available to his students now.</div><div>So, you know, we’re learning a lot about faculty working styles and the fact that we’ll need to be flexible as far as, you know, not necessarily requiring that faculty work in one way or another. But then also, you know, staying true to our kind of vision for how the process should work and not necessarily saying yes to everything if it’s going to make our lives that much harder. But at the same time, wanting to accommodate different writing styles. That’s all I can think of as far as surprises so far.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thanks, Amanda. And for talking about kind of those, negotiating those boundaries or lines between wanting to be really flexible and supportive, but also understanding that there’s limited capability among the team. And it is really interesting to hear that this author, James, was wanting to work within Pressbooks and hearing his reason why, which is wanting a draft available to his students as it’s still developing makes sense.</div><div>There’s a couple of questions here from Linda related to what you were just talking about. Linda is wondering, “Was the consortia Pressbooks cost covered by Lilly and what can the faculty grant be used for? Remuneration to faculty for work, services?”</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> I can take that one. So, we opted not to get an actual hosted instance of Pressbooks. We thought about it, but then after chatting with our local development folks, you know, we realized that this is an open source platform, we can handle this locally. So we decided to go ahead and try that again with the idea of, if it doesn’t work out in our pilot project and we need to go a different route if it’s too hard to maintain, we can shift focus there. So we were able to not have to use grant funds for that. Although of course, our technical person who helps us with that has used some of their time that we just sort of absorb out of our PALNI budget.</div><div>And the faculty grant, basically the way that we’re doing the money is that we pay the faculty directly and that they can choose to pay whatever they want to out of that. So if they need to hire students or if they, you know, want to collaborate with another faculty member, that’s fine, but we’re basically just doing the payment directly to the faculty member and we’re not working through the institution or paying out subcontractors or anything like that, just to kind of reduce the administrative load and headaches on our end basically.</div><div>But we have run into maybe a little bit of a surprise there because even though it was clearly stated in our author agreements, we’ve had a couple of projects come to us and say, “Oh, okay, well we need money to pay our students.” And it’s in our agreement that says you get the first payment after you turn in your draft. So we’ve had to kind of have some back and forths with some of the authors to remind them of what’s in the author agreement and how the product is laid out. So it has been nice to be prepared and organized in that sense, just to have those documents to refer to.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Yeah, having the author agreement is a really nice touchstone that you can turn, come back to, and look at it together.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Well, and just really quick on that. And that was one instance where we wanted to be like, “Oh, well maybe we can go ahead and pay them early.” But you know, after kind of talking it over and realizing, you know, we have an author agreement for a reason. Let’s go ahead and stick to what it says, just again, to make our lives easier, and not think that we have to renegotiate things and create new agreements because you know, circumstances have changed or preferences exist.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> So it’s nice, not just for the author, but for yourselves. “Okay, this is what we decided. We decided this for a reason. Let’s stick to it.” I can understand the temptation, too, of wanting to move away from it. So that’s a really good reminder that it also serves that purpose.</div><div>Thank you, Linda, for your questions. We appreciate them, and just a reminder, anyone is welcome to drop your questions into the chat. The next question I have for you is about your ongoing work to support authors, which you’ve touched on a little bit. It sounds like James is in the peer review stage and that the other five are perhaps in the writing stage. So what does that look like for the three of you while those authors are at those stages?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> I can speak to that. So, one of the nice things that we set up was this kind of a project manager that’s assigned to each textbook. And so because James is from Butler and I work for Butler and part of this task force, I am James’s project manager. But then for the five authors, we found somebody willing to be a project manager that is from their institution. So they have kind of a touch point without feeling like they have to always reach out to Amanda or Erin or myself. And so it’s kind of a nice way for them to ask their questions of a project manager, and if they know the answer, they can take care of it.</div><div>Or what we also set up was basically office hours once a month for our project managers, where if their authors have asked a question, they aren’t quite sure, they can always attend office hours and we can work through it and talk through it if it’s, you know, something we’ve got to work on a little bit more or, you know, we can answer pretty quickly, and then it just kind of allows our authors to have somebody to work pretty directly with.</div><div>We ask that they meet about once a month together just to touch, you know, check in, make sure everything’s going okay, you know. Right now, like you said, most of the authors are in just this writing period, so it’s just a matter of the project managers kind of just checking in, making sure that they’re still on, things are still moving along because we don’t want to hit that first milestone of, alright, a draft is due, but they haven’t talked to us in months. We have no idea what’s happening.</div><div>So that’s kind of why we set up some project managers to kind of just help increase that touch point just a little bit. And then, like I said, we’re kind of just following through with our timeline and just giving out, like with James, it was about a month before his first draft deadline. So it was kind of checking in with him, making sure that he feels ready to submit a draft to us. Because like I said, in our author agreement, you agreed to a certain timeline, and we understand that things come up, but at the time he seemed pretty confident and he met his October 1st deadline.</div><div>So it’s just kind of making sure that, you know, everybody is staying in connection with each other and that sense of communication is there. I think, you know, with our authors who are just currently writing, it’s just making sure that you’re still working on writing, you haven’t hit any sort of a speed bump, or anything that we need to work through.</div><div>It’s been really nice having those project managers because it alleviates us needing to touch points with all five authors all the time, which you can really dig into our day-to-day. So having that project manager kind of takes that little bit of load off of our plate, but also provides a closer contact for our authors if something comes up. They have somebody at their own institution to talk to.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thanks, Jennifer. And you mentioned that James had met his October 1st deadline. Do you have sort of little deadlines on the way to the big deadline, or was that the big deadline for, you know, the whole manuscript? How is that structured?</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> So for that one, pretty much, we gave him a deadline of, we need your first draft by this date. But luckily, we had been checking in once a month along the way, you know, whether it was for like just 10 to 15 minutes, it was, “Yep, I’m still working.” And since James was writing directly into Pressbooks, we could easily see that work was being done and, you know, chapters were being written. So at least in that sense, since he was in Pressbooks, we could easily confirm that things were happening.</div><div>So I guess we’ll find out if maybe we need to have more smaller concrete deadlines, but so far it seems like things are on the up and up, at least we hope. But yes, James met his October 1st, and so now we’ve moved into that peer review stage for him.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> There was one other deadline that we had early on in the project, which was to submit a outline. But since it was James, it kind of happened loosey-goosey. But with the other projects, we set that at the beginning. We asked them to submit an outline, both of content and structure in order to make sure that it was including pedagogical elements, like, you know, key terms or review questions at the end, and so that the structure would remain consistent throughout the book.</div><div>And then we also had a deadline for the budget, for them to give us an idea of how they were planning to use the funds, and if there were any contributing authors that we also had to set up agreements with.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Great, thank you both. Ann Marie has a question in the chat about whether you provide any support for faculty authors to advocate for how their work will count for promotion, tenure, and evaluation.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> That’s the million dollar question! I mean, that’s something that here at Butler we’re grappling with, because right now some of these activities don’t count towards tenure and promotion. And for us, especially within the library, it’s been a lot of just trying to get the word out that we are advocates for them, because essentially it comes down to faculty talking to their own administration. You know, it’s them having to do the work of pushing to have these things count.</div><div>I as a librarian cannot go to, you know, the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences and be like, “You should really change your tenure promotion.” I can really just be more of an advocate on your behalf And so for us, it’s just been about letting faculty know that the library’s here to support them and we’re happy to give any sort of documentation they need to see. If they need to see how things are handled with peer review, we’re happy to show those things, but it’s just that our faculty have to come and basically tell us that they need us to.</div><div>We can keep trying to have workshops and things like this, but it’s really up to our faculty to come and say, “We need you to come and maybe talk to our associate deans.” Like I said, it’s not something that I, as a member of the library cannot just go to the dean and ask them to change tenure promotion. So, I’m still waiting to hear that.</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> For PALNI schools Butler is maybe the big exception, and Jen just spoke to that, but most of the PALNI schools, like I used to work at one very small, about 900 students, and because of that tenure and promotion in many of our institutions works very differently because they’re mostly teaching-focused tenure track positions instead of research-focused. And so anything they do that counts as like supporting students kind of automatically counts towards tenure.</div><div>So for some of our institutions this would be something that counts just sort of by virtue of supporting students. And Butler would be one of our few institutions that functions more like many of the large research-focused institutions out there. So I just wanted to mention that too.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you both. And thank you for the question. So, you have all of these great phases. You have the first pilot phase, you have this group of five, and now you have the potential for a second Lilly grant since there was already so much interest. You mentioned a couple things you might do differently the second time around, particularly related to the rubric and evaluating proposals and having diversity, equity, and inclusion built into that. Are there other things that you would like to do differently the second time around?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> Well, like you just said, we’re unsure if there will be a second time. We really hope there will be because we learned that there’s a lot of interest. And we also still haven’t made it the whole way through the process so we’re learning some things and we’re learning a lot as we go.</div><div>I think one thing we’re thinking a lot about in terms of a second time is, you know, where can we be flexible with author preferences, like writing platforms and, you know, discipline specific things like we have a math book that we accepted. So how do we take our preference for them doing their work in Google Docs and work with them on their preference of writing in LaTeX. So things like that. Like, when to be flexible versus when to stick with what we’ve planned on.</div><div>As an example, I’ll just mention that yesterday, so we’ve said that it was great that James learned how to use Pressbooks. As we figured out with the peer reviewers, we ran into, “Oh, well, if we export this from Pressbooks as a PDF,” and anyway, it was a whole thing trying to get it into Google docs format from Pressbooks. We went from Pressbooks to PDF, to Word, to Google Docs, and so we discovered some formatting things. And that might be something that we change for the next time, is saying, “Hey, we need you to have a version of this that’s not just in Pressbooks to make this piece easier.” So just some of those little tech things.</div><div>And like you already mentioned, a big one for us is being more explicit in the application process and the rubric and evaluation process on the things we value. So, building DEI into that, building textbooks with a social justice focus, having that be part of the application process.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thanks Erin. Related to this question of whether there will be a second time, are there also institutional funds for any of the work or does it rely on external grants?</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> I’m un-muted, so I can answer. Right now, again, all of our institutions are small and most of them are very much struggling. And so almost all of our money comes from these external grants right now. Again there’s a handful of institutions, Jen, I don’t know if you have anything at Butler, but like very few of our institutions would have any funds to support this internally.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> If we were talking that COVID had never happened, yes. We would have been able to carve out some budget funds for Butler faculty because one of the initial things that got this whole thing started was, you know, I talked to Amanda saying, if I just let my faculty run wild, they would have taken every publishing opportunity that PALNI would have given. And so it would have been nice that, barring COVID, you know, we would’ve carved out some money so that if we had more Butler faculty who would have wanted to publish, we could have offered it as a parallel program to what PALNI was doing. But, you know, 20 percent reductions in budgets, that money was gone before it even showed up. So at this point we’re still very much relying on external grants.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> I can say too, from the PALNI perspective, this whole program, our affordable learning program, started as a program funded by PALNI as a consortium, as a nonprofit organization working with the schools, and a significant portion of our original budget came just from the PALNI budget. So, you know, we did several thousand dollars in reviews, stipends, and things like that before we even got the Lilly grant. So affordable learning, and I think publishing, is a goal of PALNI as an organization. So, even if we don’t have external funding to fund projects to the degree that we have working with Lilly, I’m certain that PALNI will be able to budget, allocate some funding to extend this program going forward in some perhaps reduced form. So there is some.</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> And outside of funding, I will say, having formerly worked at a very small PALNI institution where they lack in funds, they are very, like, they realize what PALNI is giving them sort of in return. So basically every librarian at a PALNI institution is on some sort of PALNI committee. So when Amanda was talking about deep collaboration, that is like director level to staff level in these libraries. So even though there’s not necessarily institutional funds, there’s institutional time that is supporting these projects. Throwing that in there, too.<br><br></div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you all. So the last question I have for you is about how your experience can inform our work more broadly as a community that is publishing OER.</div><div><strong>Erin:</strong> I think we all have things to say on this. I would just say the reaching out to others and asking questions. Again, that meeting I had with VIVA was just so helpful for getting us going and knowing where to start.</div><div>And also, and this might be a unique thing to the kind of faculty we’re working with at PALNI, but I think we were really shocked at how many people we said, “Sorry, we can’t give you this grant” and they were like, “Oh, well how can I publish this book anyway?” So just this reminder that money isn’t necessarily everything that faculty are after. They might just want a platform. They might just really want to put their book out there, and so thinking of those non-monetary ways to support them is important.</div><div><strong>Jennifer:</strong> And kind of building off of the sense that we were able to offer Pressbooks is the fact that it could be scaled. We initially had our big, these five are fully funded. But then there was also the sense of, well, we can still make the platform available and if you want to put your work out there, we may not be able to provide monetary support, but at least we have platform support and they were able to do that. We have a couple of books.</div><div>As Erin said, there were people still wanting to just make their work available. So just the fact that the platform was there seemed to, you know, it was very helpful for faculty just knowing that there was something out there that they could be using to produce their textbook.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> And I’ll just sort of wrap up with echoing both what Erin and Jen said. We did learn a lot from other community members. This whole experience has really highlighted the need for organizations like the OEN in order to help us get started and give us the confidence that we need to feel like this is something that we can do, even though we don’t really have any idea what we’re doing. You go to several workshops, you go to, you know, an online canvas thing and you learn from your peers and you talk to people, and that’s how we do this.</div><div>So, kind of in the spirit of that sharing, we’ve been putting the tools that we create for this program on our website and it’s all licensed CC BY. We’re not necessarily saying that our resources are the best, but they offer examples for you to look at and they are things that we have updated iteratively as we’ve gone through the process. So we’re making them available to you to look at and to adapt, and hopefully they’ll be helpful.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you very much, Amanda, Jennifer, and Erin. If any of you in this call have last minute questions for them, please feel free to drop them in the chat. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and reflections and also your documentation. It is really valuable.</div><div>I’ll just add on to what Amanda mentioned. If you are interested in participating in PUB101, which is free for OEN members and currently being revised by a new PUB101 committee so that it’s up-to-date and relevant for the questions you’re facing, if you’re starting or thinking about OER publishing, we will have a new cohort in the spring. There’s no cost, and it is based on this canvas curriculum, which is currently being revised, but in the meantime I think there’s some helpful resources there in terms of different forms and things that you can adapt for your program.</div><div>I have not seen any last-minute questions pop into the chat, but if you are a member of the OEN and they come to you later, please feel free to post them in our Google group. And thank all of you for joining us and being a part of this conversation and doing work to support open education. We appreciate you and your time, and thanks again to our three guests. We hope to see you soon, but until then, farewell. Bye.</div><div>END OF VIDEO</div><h2>Chat Transcript</h2><div>00:18:01 Barbara R Thees: Open Education Network: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/oen/">https://open.umn.edu/oen/</a><br>00:18:32 Amanda Hurford: PALNI: <a href="https://www.palni.org/">https://www.palni.org/</a><br>00:19:56 Barbara R Thees: OEN YouTube: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_lf4_Wss_uW0KGny_A3erg">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_lf4_Wss_uW0KGny_A3erg</a><br>00:22:38 Amanda Hurford: <a href="https://palsave.palni.org/">https://palsave.palni.org/</a><br>00:33:22 Barbara R Thees: Info on the OEN’s Pub101 and Publishing Co-op: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/otn/publishing/">https://open.umn.edu/otn/publishing/</a><br>00:39:14 Amanda Hurford: <a href="https://pressbooks.palni.org/community/">https://pressbooks.palni.org/community/</a><br>00:41:41 Amanda Hurford: rubric: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/14SVKl8T_GB1CKKWYNlwXm-GV60VBZllba-IhRU2kbFM">https://docs.google.com/document/d/14SVKl8T_GB1CKKWYNlwXm-GV60VBZllba-IhRU2kbFM</a><br>00:44:40 linda hauck: Why didn’t you include these considerations in the rubric?<br>00:44:44 Amanda Hurford: The projects we selected are listed here: <a href="https://palsave.palni.org/textbook-creation-grants/">https://palsave.palni.org/textbook-creation-grants/</a><br>00:45:54 linda hauck: Makes sense!<br>00:48:33 linda hauck: Was the consortial Pressbooks cost covered by Lilly?<br>00:49:52 linda hauck: What can faculty grant be used for? Remuneration to faculty for work, services?<br>00:49:58 Amanda Hurford: We are hosting it locally<br>00:51:34 linda hauck: Nice simple way to structure it!<br>00:56:03 Amanda Hurford: Our project managers are on either our PALSave or Publishing Services Team<br>00:58:58 Anne Marie Gruber: Do you provide any support for faculty authors to advocate for how their work will “count” for promotion/tenure/evaluation?<br>01:03:02 Anne Marie Gruber: Are there also institutional funds for any of this work or does it only rely on external grants?<br>01:07:38 Amanda Hurford: good point Erin<br>01:10:11 Amanda Hurford: <a href="https://palsave.palni.org/textbook-creation-grants/">https://palsave.palni.org/textbook-creation-grants/</a><br>01:10:30 linda hauck: You have so much to be proud of!<br>01:10:57 Amanda Hurford: Thank you!<br>01:11:13 Karen Lauritsen: Pub101: <a href="https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630">https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/106630</a><br>01:11:42 Mélanie Brunet: Thank you!<br>01:11:55 Rosita Hopper: Great info. Tank you ?<br>01:12:00 Gabby Hernandez: Thank you!</div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/452021-12-10T12:00:00Z2022-01-14T18:51:25ZConsortial Members Connect and Collaborate in New OEN Forum<div>First meeting in November 2021, the Nourishing Inter-Consortial Collaborative Excellence (NICE) group is a best practices forum hosted by the Open Education Network (OEN). The new online community provides consortial members an opportunity to connect and share OER initiative strategies and ideas, successes and failures, as well as questions and answers. <br><br></div><h4>Taking off</h4><div>“This is one of many creative, member-driven ideas and services we’re offering to connect members in a meaningful way that’s relevant to them,” said Barb Thees, OEN Community Manager and discussion co-facilitator. Thees added that the process for launching NICE has been exceptionally smooth. “I’m impressed by the energy right from the get-go,” she said. “It’s really taking off.”<br><br></div><div>One-hour meetings recur on the second Tuesday of each month at 2pm CT. NICE members choose the topic of each Zoom meeting and nominate fellow members as guest speakers.<br><br></div><h4>November NICE: “Dealing with Misperceptions about OER among Faculty”</h4><div>The November meeting addressed “Dealing with Misperceptions about OER among Faculty.” Guest speakers Bob Awkward of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, and Christina Trunnell of Treasure State Academic Information & Library Services, kicked off the discussion by briefly sharing their experiences and key takeaways on the issue.<br><br></div><div>Awkward emphasized the importance of motivating faculty to “dip their toes into the water,” noting that change, including the switch from traditional textbooks to OER, is quite often resisted. However, with training and the opportunity to peer review an open textbook, approximately 45 percent of faculty adopt OER, he pointed out. In addition, Awkward recommended faculty awards and incentives to promote participation.<br><br></div><div>Trunnell told the group that the key to gaining faculty buy-in lies, in large part, in the approach. “It’s all about the tone with which you approach faculty,” she advised. “When you’re doing OER promotion, be sure to clearly convey the message, ‘This could really help your students and you!’” Trunnell added that faculty also appreciate reassurances that there will be ongoing support throughout the OER adoption process.<br><br></div><h4>Small group discussions</h4><div>Dana Mastroianni, Chatham University Reference and Electronic Resources Librarian, was one of approximately two dozen members listening to Trunnell and Awkward, and who participated in the small group discussions that followed.<br><br></div><div>“The meeting initially piqued my interest because I think it’s good to see what other libraries are doing,” said Mastroianni, who is also Chair of Affordable Learning PA’s (ALPA) Assessment and Data working group. “It could be helpful for me to see what other consortia are doing as far as collecting data and assessment. And it could help ALPA, as a project of the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, in quantifying the larger effort across Pennsylvania.”<br><br></div><h4>Leveraging collective knowledge</h4><div>According to Thees, inspiration for the NICE group originated at OEN’s 2021 Summit in the session, “Scaling OER Initiatives & Maximizing OEN Membership: Best Practices for Consortia,” with Anna Bendo, Emily Frank, and Bryan McGeary.<br><br></div><div>The session revealed that members were dealing with a wide range of challenges including fatigue/burnout, fiscal uncertainty, overburdened faculty, time constraints, the shift to virtual, re-ordering priorities due to Covid, hiring freezes, and more.<br><br></div><div>“The session identified a need,” Thees recalls. “The NICE group responds to that need, supporting consortia at the organizational level with an opportunity to leverage our collective knowledge.” Meetings support professional connections, and are guided by norms that include active listening, respectfulness, appreciation for diverse perspectives, clear and open communication, and openness to different modes of communication, among others.<br><br></div><h4>A resource within reach</h4><div>As Mastroianni works to make OER at her institution more formalized, she sees herself continuing to participate in NICE conversations. “It’s always interesting to see the challenges of institutions no matter what size they are,” she said. “I appreciate this group and the breadth and depth of experience in it. I’m looking forward to getting more information and contributing in any way I can.” <br><br></div><div>If you’re an OEN consortial member interested in joining upcoming NICE discussions, reach out to <a href="mailto:thee0017@umn.edu">Barb Thees</a> to be added to meeting communications. The next NICE meeting is scheduled on December 14 at 2pm CT to discuss “Non-Monetary Incentives & Awards for Faculty.” All meetings are posted on the <a href="https://open.umn.edu/community/hub">Community Hub</a> events calendar.<br><br></div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/422021-11-30T12:00:00Z2022-04-06T15:00:54ZNovember Office Hours: The Power of No<div><em>Watch the </em><a href="https://youtu.be/Sg6jAB1UdUY"><em>video recording</em></a><em> of this Office Hours 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.</em></div><div><br></div><div><strong>Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please </strong><a href="mailto:joh20849@umn.edu"><strong>contact Tonia</strong></a><strong>.</strong></div><h2>Audio Transcript</h2><div><strong>Office Hours: The Power of No</strong></div><div><strong>Speakers:</strong></div><ul><li>Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)</li><li>Apurva Ashok (Director of Open Education, The Rebus Foundation)</li><li>Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)</li><li>Johanna Meetz (Publishing & Repository Services Librarian, Ohio State University)</li><li>Elizabeth Speer (Electronic Resources & Acquisitions Librarian, University of North Texas Health Science Center)</li><li>Karen Bjork (Head of Digital Initiatives, Cataloging, & eAccess, Portland State University Library)</li></ul><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Welcome everybody to another Office Hours. I am Apurva Ashok, I’m the director of open education at the Rebus Foundation. And I’m very excited to welcome you all to our 50th Office Hours session that we have conducted with our wonderful co-organizers, the Open Education Network. We thought it would be a really great milestone to hit this session by talking about sometimes slowing down and saying no to all of the wonderful ideas and opportunities that might cross our plates.</div><div>So that we can say yes to ones that’ll take us even further. As always, I just want to remind folks that these sessions are recorded and shared on YouTube. They’re also going to be captioned as well, and for anyone who needs live transcription, you can use the subtitles that are available via Zoom. We also save the conversation that is in the chat, so if you’re sharing something there, know that you’ll be able to reference it later.</div><div>And if you share something accidentally and want this anonymized you can have that struck from the record. And you can just reach us at the email address I’m popping in the chat right now. So if there’s ever anything you say that you don’t want saved forever and licensed openly, just get in touch at contact@rebus.community.</div><div>Before I pass it over to Karen, I want to respectfully acknowledge that I am joining you all today from the traditional territories of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I thank them very much for the privilege to live, work and play here. And for allowing all of us to meet and learn together on this territory.</div><div>And I know that there are many ways that my own practices and that of Rebus can continue to support decolonization and reconciliation work in Canada, and that’s something I’m always going to be mindful about. If you all know where you are joining from and what traditional territories you might be privileged to be on please let me know in the chat. And I think with that I will turn it over to Karen to tell you a little bit about her and the OEN.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you very much, Apurva. And here’s to another 50 sessions of Office Hours. It is great to partner with you and Monica and the Rebus Community on these monthly sessions. I’m Karen Lauritsen, I’m publishing director with the Open Education Network. I am based in San Louis Obispo, California, which is the traditional land of the northern Chumash.</div><div>And we are based at the University of Minnesota, where we are basically a hub for people like you, a community of professionals who are working to make higher education more equitable through open education. As Apurva mentioned, we are talking about the power of no today. And reflecting perhaps on the year and one of the toughest parts of being a professional and particularly an OER advocate, and that is saying no.</div><div>It can be really hard to turn someone down, or to acknowledge maybe that we don’t have the capacity we want to do all of the very exciting things for our students and faculty. So today, we are joined by four guests, who will help offer support and ideas for strategies to say no. And those are Amanda Larson, who is Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State University.<br>Johanna Meetz, who is Publishing and Repository Services Librarian at Ohio State University. Elizabeth Speer, who is Electronic Resources and Acquisitions Librarian at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. And Karen Bjork, Head of Digital Initiatives, Cataloging, and eAccess at Portland State University Library. So to get us started today, I will turn things over to Johanna.</div><div><strong>Johanna:</strong> Hi, thanks for being here with us today. I wanted to start us off by talking about how I became more comfortable with saying no. It took me some time to get comfortable with saying no when it’s appropriate, because it wasn’t really something that was part of any culture that I’ve worked in or in a workplace. But with time, I have found that being able to say no really allows me to ensure that my work and the work of others in my department is sustainable and scalable both now and into the future.</div><div>And it also empowers me to actively curate my work and the overall direction the department is headed. Gaining trust and getting buy in from supervisors and administration to be able to say no to new projects that may come your way can be difficult, especially if you work in a climate that defines success as growth. In this scenario, I recommend trying to redefine success to include metrics other than just growth.</div><div>No matter what the work of a department is, it cannot grow indefinitely without adding additional workers. And unless we are lucky enough to have the funding to do this, to add additional people, there is a ceiling on what is possible with all of our work. And it’s really important to acknowledge and take that into account when we’re thinking about what success means to ourselves as well as what it means to our supervisors and administrators.</div><div>And if growth is part of your definition of success, I just suggest adding other additional ways to assess things. You can think about success in terms of sustainability, the ability to do the work that you’re doing with your current resources over time, with scalability or with just generally the ability to add more work that will have the most impact. And I also think it’s important to define success in terms of how satisfied and fulfilled people are in their jobs.</div><div>So from a practical perspective, if people feel that they have some control over the work, the projects that they’re taking on, or how their actual work is completed, they tend to be more invested. And that general job satisfaction and investment can help decrease turnover, which certainly has an unquestionably negative impact on any of the work that we’re doing.</div><div>But just from a human centered perspective, I feel it’s one of my most important jobs as a supervisor to ensure as much as I am able the happiness and fulfilment of those that I supervise. So speaking of staff members, I think it’s important to take that those we work with are supervised into account in this process. So in my experience, the trepidation about saying no that they may feel can be different than that of supervisors or administrators.</div><div>There may be anxiety about change in general, there may be anxiety about being successful according to these new definitions of success. And there may even be concerns that if too much change is made to services, they may lose their jobs. And Covid has heightened these anxieties in particular, since so many people have lost their jobs. So overall, I think it’s important to just involve any staff that you work with or that you supervise in the creation of these new definitions of success.</div><div>And the new goals and practices also. Remember also that saying no is a skill, it takes practice to be comfortable with it. And having frank discussions where people can share their concerns can help them become more comfortable with incorporating saying no into their work or help them come to terms with the department as a whole making a decision to say no to something. And with that, I will hand it over to Amanda.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Awesome, thank you. So in thinking about how to make this differ from the presentation that we gave during the Open Education Network Summit, I’m still going to touch on some of the things that I talked about then because I think that they’re important. But I’m also going to share some new information, too so you’re getting bonus added. So thinking about being an individual who is in a position and for open education that can look like a lot of different things.</div><div>You could be you in a team of people, it can be you by yourself, so everyone’s individual, it could not be your whole job even. It could be a temporary job, like for example I’m in a temporary position. I have a five-year contract at Ohio State. And what that means for somebody who’s in a precarious position is that you get four good years of work out of me before I have to start thinking about where does my next job come from?</div><div>I have to start being on the market, and that also being temporary makes it harder to say no to things sometimes, because you feel like you have to overperform. And so something I didn’t talk about last time was not letting vocational awe also influence our yeses. I’m going to put a link in the chat to the article about vocational awe and librarianship. If you haven’t read it, I suggest it’s a must read for anybody who’s in a library position.</div><div>I think it’s also beneficial for folks who are in instructional design positions, in any position where the work you’re doing, the good of the work that you’re doing should outweigh any way you want to set a boundary. It’s a really helpful thing to read. So thinking about being an individual in a precarious position, for me saying no is a strategic thing. I have five years to do the best work that I can do in the hopes that they might renew my contract.</div><div>But that means I can’t say yes to everything, because I won’t be able to do all of those things well. And I want the things that I’m going to do to be really polished and be the best example for the university that it can be, to make as much movement as possible. So one of the things to think about is when you say yes to things you’re creating a time debt, which means when you say no you still have options to do other things.</div><div>You haven’t committed to something that’s going to take up your time and eat it up and be a responsibility that you have to commit to, that takes not only your time but your energy and your resources. It will pull you away from other things. So that’s one thing to think about is when you say yes, you’re creating a time debt. Do you have the space to create that time debt? So I think about it as staying strategically on track.</div><div>And when I say that I mean does it meet the strategic goals of my position? And if you haven’t had a conversation about what the strategic goals of your position are with your supervisor, that’s a great place to start, like a lot of my work ties to the strategic outcomes for the library, their strategic initiatives. And then, if we go up the chain to the strategic plan of the university as a whole.</div><div>So I have to think about do I have the capacity to take on something new within the scope of the duties that I already have? And if it aligns with those strategic priorities but would be too much on my plate if I say yes to it, what could I take off of my plate or pay less attention to, so it’s balancing out responsibilities? So for example, I said yes to an opportunity that is outside of my work duties, it is a paid opportunity for another university.</div><div>So I had to check and see like would that be a conflict of interest? And if it was, how did I have to document it? I’m developing some course modules for another university around open education and I had to look at not only what was on my plate with work to make sure I could still accomplish everything in my main primary job. But also, what else is happening in my life?</div><div>So one of the things that I had planned to do this semester was apply to grad school. And I had to say that no, I can’t do that right now. I have this very short-term contract to create some course modules, I need to get that down. I’m not exceptionally thrilled with the way that the university is handling Covid with students, so that weighed into that balancing thing. But thinking about I said yes to this opportunity, so now I don’t have space to spend the time to recruit people to write me letters of recommendation or to fill out an application.</div><div>Or to think about where is the money going to come from to apply for that? So I had to balance those two things out. And also, we’ve all just been through a pandemic, are still going through a pandemic, do I have the mental capacity to actually be in school and do a job in the side and do my real job all the time? And so I had to, and it was really hard to accept that I wasn’t going to say yes to grad school this time around.</div><div>But I think it’s really important to think about that strategically what you say yes and no to. Another example that I would share is I used to be on a faculty tenure track position that was super secure, and I had to look at the pros and cons of that. And was it serving me strategically? Was I getting the benefits I needed to grow my expertise? Was my expertise being listened to in the position I was in?</div><div>And balance that against being gaslit about things that were happening in the library and across different units in the university, working with somebody who was really difficult. And so staying in your position can also be one of those really hard yes or nos. So thinking about much broader, like there’s also that awe of being on the tenure track. And I can’t possibly leave because I have to stay on the grind to get tenure.</div><div>That’s another thing that’s really tricky for a librarian also, faculty members to think through. But not making a choice and just staying is actually making a choice. You’re choosing to stay and commit to those things, so thinking about that, too. And then, the other thing I would say is when you do say no, it’s really helpful to manage the expectations around your no. So making sure that you refer people to other folks.</div><div>So saying, “You know, I’m really at capacity now. But there’s a subject liaison in your area who is also interested and well versed in affordability and can also help you curate resources for your course. Let me make this referral.” And then, do a really warm hand off for those folks. Talking to your manager about this is a really great opportunity, and I had this conversation around doing outside work outside of the university, like this is a really great opportunity for me to grow my portfolio.</div><div>And it is aligned with my work, I will make resources that I can use in my day-to-day job, so in that way it does benefit the work that I’m doing. But also thinking about other opportunities that come across your plate and having that conversation with your manager or your supervisor and saying, “If I say yes to this, what can I take off my plate? Is this opportunity actually aligned with my work? And this is a really good idea, but can we talk about how we need to finish up this project first before we do this next project?”</div><div>I use that a lot when I’m working with my folks on my affordable learning working group thinking through the projects we’re going to take on. So we’ve been working on a draft resource and they’ve been kicking up new ideas. I’m like, “That’s really great y’all, but we still need to finish our draft statement so that we can that polished. And then we’ll identify a new project.” So it’s really about setting and managing expectations around saying no. And I’m going to hand it over to Elizabeth.</div><div><strong>Elizabeth:</strong> Thanks. I’m going to apologize right now if you guys hear construction. The library is under a constant state of construction, so I’ve just gotten used to it, and hopefully it won’t bother us too badly. In my current role I have to say no to a lot of things that actually have to do with inclusion of items in the collection, even if those items are open. But I’ve found that some of the tools that I used in order to do that actually help me say no in other ways across campus in projects and things that people want me to take on.</div><div>And so, I have what I call my toolbox. My toolbox is broken up into three sections, and those three sections are policies and procedures, templates that I use and then personal knowledge. And so, within our library when I came on board our collection development policy, like many people’s I think, had not been updated in like 20 years. So one of the first things that I had to realize was that I needed to get all of my ducks in a row when it came to the policies and procedures that I was going to need to follow and to utilize in my position.</div><div>Because knowing what those are and how those affect you helps you to be able to say no to things. And for us, I have a lot of policies and procedures that I have to take into account. There’s like nine of them. And that includes things like the institutional and library strategic plan, we have a five-year and a one-year strategic plan. I have to always keep those in mind because if I’m being asked to say yes to something that doesn’t align with that, it’s really not feasible for me to say yes.</div><div>That probably needs to be a no because it doesn’t promote what it is that the university is trying to accomplish. We also have things like the collection development policy, emergency plans, our mission statements. We are a values-based institution, so those values have to come into play on what we say yes and no to across campus. And any time that we are representing the university outside, they ask us to take that into account when we make those decisions.</div><div>We also use OKRs, objectives and key results, both across campus and individuals and as a department. So all of those things – and there’s the construction noise sorry – all those things kind of have to align for me to be able to say yes or no based on what those policies and everything say. And when it comes to saying no to things like free resources within the catalog, I am in charge of all electronic resources on this campus.</div><div>So ultimately, the decision of whether or not to include something is up to me, but I have to have ways that I can say no that are valid and that I can back up. And so, using all of those policies and procedures along with templates that I have created so that my language is standardized when I say no, it helps that everyone gets the same message. That means it’s not me personally saying no to you.</div><div>It is backed up with policy and fact as to why we can’t include this thing. I get a lot of people looking at me, going, “But it’s free, just put it in the catalog.” No. My selections for the catalog are intentional, they do follow guidelines, they have to do things like support our curriculum and have a purpose so that we don’t have a bloated catalog that no one can find anything in.</div><div>Saying no is important across all aspects of your job, not just when it comes to your time, but you need to be respectful of the other people that you work with and their time. Because me saying yes to including something for example an open education textbook which does not support our curriculum, it doesn’t just affect me. It affects my assistant, it affects my cataloging department that has to create that brand new record and manage that record within our system.</div><div>It affects our education and research librarians, who then have to filter through unnecessary items within our catalog that don’t support anything. So for me, saying no is actually a way to better serve the people that are our students, faculty, and staff. It is a way to better support my co-workers, it is a way to better support the mission of the university. You can’t say yes to everything.</div><div>For example, I’m in a medical university and I had a faculty member two weeks ago want me to add an open English textbook into my catalog. We don’t offer an English class, there is not a single English class on my entire campus, but a friend of theirs wrote it and they were super proud of it. And they wanted me to put it in our catalog, somewhere people could find it.</div><div>And while that is a generous and wonderful thought, they got the same no statement that every other faculty member that has asked me to buy something really expensive that didn’t fit our curriculum got. Didn’t matter that it was a free resource, it did not fit our goals, it did not fit our policies, it did not fit our procedures. And I use templates to create a standardized no, started with a Word document, where I just typed up responses to things and kept it in my portion of the shared drive.</div><div>Nobody else even knew it existed. Also when I say no, I say no via email. Just because one, you’re not staring someone in the face, it’s much harder to say no when you’re looking at someone and they are looking very disappointed in you. I’m a people pleaser, I like to say yes and so if you’re staring at me looking at me with those sad puppy eyes and really making me feel bad about saying no, it’s much harder.</div><div>So I do always say no via email, and I say no in the same way each time if at all possible so that it’s like I said standardized language is really, really important in communicating. And then, I also have a record of why I said no when someone loops back around, because they forget that I provided them an answer. And they want to know why I’m not doing this thing and I am one of those crazy people if you look in my deleted items folder there’s like 400,000 things in there.</div><div>Because I never actually delete anything, because eventually someone is going to wrap back around and want to know why three years ago I told them no on this thing that they forgot about and now they’ve remembered. So no is going to happen. I think one of the best things you can do for yourself as a professional is have your reasons for no prepared so that you can pull from those resources and you’re not having to create your response over and over and over.</div><div>Know what it is that you have the power to say no to on your own, without having to take that to anybody else. In my position anything having to do with the collection I don’t have to get approval to say no. I am the collection and therefore these are my policies, these are my procedures and I get to set those, which does make it easier for me to say no. I know that, I know that’s a level of power that not everyone has.</div><div>But I also have worked with my administration to make sure that everyone is clear on where that barrier is and what’s within my power to control and say no to without there being repercussions that may cause issues across the library. So I think those conversations and having all of your toolbox together if you will is really important as a professional to be able to manage expectations, not just for yourself but that the university has for you. And on that note, I’m going to pass it to Karen.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. So I believe that the best way to build a publishing program is to set goals and develop a specific action plan that will guide your efforts. So sometimes this does require saying no to projects in order to stay focused on that plan. And this can be scary, but as my fellow panelists have very well articulated, don’t let that fear guide you. So before I get into discussing that plan, I just wanted to briefly emphasize what my fellow panelists have already said.</div><div>That saying no is really a strategic decision. So in 2020, I came across a Tweet that included a decision tree that really captures what I need to remind my own self of. And I really hope that this resonates with you all as well. So the top of the tree says decisions to take on new project. And then, below that is do you have enough time to do this? And then, directly below that it has yes, but then it says no, you don’t.</div><div>And then over to the right of is there enough time, there’s a no and then it says don’t take it. So essentially this decision tree reminds me that even if you have the time and or the funding to take on or support another publishing project, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. As Johanna said, and as Amanda has spoken about, publishing is a partnership and creating a sustainable publishing program whether it be an OER creation or journal publishing requires a lot of planning and patience.</div><div>And as we all know and have all experienced, projects generally take more work than we initially think they will. And what may be a small project that you can quickly get done in two weeks, ends up being a large summer month-long project that you now have to pull your students into because it was just going to be easy and simple. And I’m not at all talking about an experience that I just had this summer, as I am shaking my head.</div><div>So like many of my panelists, when I launched my publishing program, I was really eager to take on new projects and grow. I really wanted Portland State to be known for open textbook publishing and I really wanted to be able to save our students money. But I quickly learned that I really needed to slow down saying yes, and I really needed to start having in depth conversations with potential authors and editors.</div><div>So for an example, I’m going to briefly talk about our journal publishing program. And so before our publishing program agrees to host a journal, my team has several conversations with future editors about what it means to publish and how much work it takes. We do this to gather an understanding of the editor’s publishing knowledge and to start forming relationships.</div><div>A focus of the conversation is to try to talk the editors out of publishing and having us mutually agree to saying no to that project. And so this may sound harsh, but we really do need to focus on the amount of time and effort and work that it does take to edit a journal. And the amount of work that it does take on top of everything else that the editors are doing. Editing a journal at least within our university is unpaid work.</div><div>So a lot of our editors are either students or they’re faculty members, and we really need to make sure that they’re clear that they’re taking on this work above and beyond everything else that they’re doing. So my library provides the platform to publish. But all of the work and effort to get the journal up and running and new issues and volumes published all fall on the shoulders of the editors.</div><div>And we really work to ensure that the editors have a well thought out policy and procedure and a really clear succession plan. This leads to a really small but sustainable publishing program. So about the plan and how I’ve been able to more effectively and strategically say no. So Kate McCready and Emma Molls from the University of Minnesota published an article in 2018 which I will throw in the chat here for you all.</div><div>Let me just grab the link. The article is called developing a business plan for a library publishing program. So let me just throw this in here. And if you have not read it, highly recommend it because it totally changed my perspective on saying no. The article stresses that library publishers must develop a clear service model and business plan.</div><div>And according to Kate and Emma the anatomy of a library publishing business plan includes the principles of the program scope of service, staff requirements, and other aspects included in the production policies, financial structures, and measures of success. So this business plan is what I have structured my publishing program around. And it really has helped with goal setting, it provides a template to evaluate projects that we’ll be taking on.</div><div>It assists us with creating a templated response to why we are saying no to something, and it is seen as our guiding post. I do recommend as Elizabeth talked about sharing your plan with your dean or director, to really make sure that everyone is on the same page, in order to provide that backup in case there is pushback. You can then go to your dean or director and say, “We are basing this decision off of our business plan.”</div><div>And the dean and director can be like, “Yes, I do remember that. That is exactly why that is correct.” And it really helps with the flow of the conversation. So one thing to really keep in mind that is very important I think we all learned this in 2020, that life changes, situations change. And so, your plan is that living, breathing document and you really do need to adjust your goals to the situation that you’re currently in.</div><div>So for me, I schedule a time one to two times a year to re-examine our business plan and during this examination, I look at what our goals are. And I also look at what we have on our external as well as our internal facing materials. Do they match up? Are what we’re saying on our library website is what we’re actually doing internally? I run an assessment, an environmental scan to learn what’s valued by our publishing partners.</div><div>So I reach out and have conversations with our editors, talk about how things are going, how they’re feeling if there’s anything we need to change within our services. Anything we need to shift because that’s really going to guide us as we start intake on new projects. And I clearly write what we will not support, so I outline the division of responsibilities and I look at what the expectations of the editors are and what the expectations of the authors are.</div><div>So I am sure you all are just clamoring to see what our plan looks like. And thankfully, I have a link to share for you all. So I will put this in now. So here is our plan, it is open for everyone to look at. And if you are looking at it right now, you will see that the last time I updated it was May of 2021. And I really just go through and I talk about where the background of our publishing program, how we’ve grown and changed.</div><div>I’ve also taken a look at let’s see here. I’ve also taken a look at our principles and our philosophy. And then, our services, the eligibility and scope and then again, here is our division of our responsibilities. So this publishing plan, a lot of it is focused on our journal publishing, but we also utilize it for our open textbook publishing and creation. And then, we actually have a whole services and we go into our proposal and our review process and what our expectations are.</div><div>So I’m going to wrap it up there and open it up to questions, because I see a lot of you had some really great questions as my fellow panelists were speaking.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you so much, Karen, Elizabeth, Amanda and Johanna. Such great guidance, both practical, pragmatic, and I think emotional in terms of let’s think about where we are in a society, the emphasis on productivity, continued growth which is unsustainable. We’re seeing that in so many areas of our lives. And one of the questions that we have is related to hands on things that we can use to continue to guide us.</div><div>Helpful worksheets and guides that can help me and my staff to think through all of these points. So a few of you mentioned I use this decision tree and thank you so much for finding that decision tree, Kim, and posting it in the chat. If there are other resources that you can share with attendees, I think those would be much appreciated. And I think of course one of the greatest resources is one another and being able to turn to one another and talk through the fear of saying no, which a few of you talked about.</div><div>It can be scary. And as I was listening to the four of you, I wondered how did you find each other and know that you all wanted to talk on this topic? Community is so helpful, how did that come about?</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> I guess I could start it, so Johanna and I have been talking about putting together a presentation for saying no for how many years now? Four?</div><div><strong>Johanna:</strong> Yeah, something like that.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> And we kept getting rejected, we would put in presentation proposals, but we kept at it, because we thought this is really important and something people need to think about. So we presented at the library publishing forum. And I believe that that’s where Amanda actually heard about our presentation, isn’t that correct, Amanda?</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> Actually a step before that, I heard about it before it happened because Johanna and I are work colleagues and have lunch together and we were chatting about it. And at the same time I was also on the OEN summit planning committee and was in charge of making community member events happen. And I’m like, “Wouldn’t this be such a cool idea if we brought together people who could talk about different ways of saying no to meet the different perspectives?”</div><div>And Elizabeth was also on the summit planning committee, and she was like, “That sounds like a great idea. I say no to things all the time.” I was like, “So do I.” And so I pulled us all together into a meeting and then we started planning for that first presentation together as the four of us.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> And it’s just snowballed from there.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. And as Apurva said in the chat, the remaining 20 minutes is definitely the time for conversation, so feel free to unmute and ask your questions.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> And I might just build on Kim’s question from earlier and ask you, Johanna, because you talked about team dynamics and being mindful of that. How do you actually go about guiding conversations with your staff when you are trying to redefine maybe those more traditional conceptual notions of success if some of us in the room here are going to go back and chat to our teams? Do you have any tips for us?</div><div><strong>Johanna:</strong> Sure, I am still in the process of working through an assessment that we started our publishing program in particular. So it has some formal elements but is largely more informal and essentially it has been rolled into that a little bit for me. So what we’ve done is talked with a selection of our journal editors. We talked with our internal partners in our IT department, other liaison librarians, folks like that.</div><div>And then, we also have spoken with essentially we just talked to all our stakeholders, colleagues inside and outside the libraries. And at the same time, now the person that I directly supervise, and I have had a series of really in-depth conversations about each essentially that we work on. Each journal we publish through the pain points, what is some scope creep we’ve seen the time as editors were all over.</div><div>What have we taken on that wasn’t originally our goal to take on? Things like that to bring to light where we could standardize services across what we’re doing, but also look closely at those pain points. And as part of that, we had the blessing of the sponsor of our assessment to not wait until the very end to start making changes. So the person I supervise is somebody who’s – like what is the negatives can happen here?</div><div>Will journals leave? Will we see it have a negative impact on our program? This person’s concerned about that deeply. And so I was kind of like, “Well, let’s start small.” And we had an editor turn over in one of our journals and we’ve been doing a bunch of checking on their image quality to do with hoping to have their journal indexed in PubMed, working toward that.</div><div>So we decided to hand that off to the editors, as something they would take care of. And so told them when we gave them instructional materials and we answered questions as they’ve been through it the first time. But he came to me and was like, “They just did it. They’re doing it.” And I was like, “Yeah.” Essentially nothing bad happened, there wasn’t a consequence like he had feared and in the end that saved us a lot of time and effort to have that workflow.</div><div>They’re also in a better position to do that work, because they can be in touch with the authors sooner in the process. So we’re not right at the point of publication and saying, “You have to remake every chart in your article, surprise.” So I think it was about wading in and also starting small and seeing positive change come from this and seeing very limited pushback or negative consequences.</div><div>And we’ve done this in a couple of other instances too that are small. So I think it’s just building up especially if that’s not something that’s been part of work culture if you’re trying to create that culture. Start small, get input, be in touch, know how people are feeling, that matters too, not just what they’re saying, and walk them through it slowly.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thank you so much.</div><div><strong>Johanna:</strong> Can I add one more thing? And that is I also think it is worth preparing for a worst-case scenario and recognizing like talking about that. What are we afraid of here? What’s the worst thing that could happen? What would happen if that happened? What would we do? And that’s helpful, too.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Karen, I saw you unmute, so it looked like you wanted to add something.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Yes, I did. I just wanted to reinforce what Johanna was saying in the fact that starting small and really looking at those smaller changes can make a really big difference in advancing to taking things off your plate and saying no to doing services. One of the things we’ve also found particularly with publishing is that we are constantly training our editors and particularly because editors are leaving or transitioning.</div><div>So we also use that as an opportunity to re-evaluate our services as well as to say what should we be doing or not be doing and changing it that way. The other thing I wanted to quickly add as well is I also ask my staff is there anything I can take off of your plate? Is there anything that you’re currently doing that maybe we could look at redistributing it to somebody else?</div><div>Or maybe it should just come off of your plate permanently. And particularly now, when I feel like my staff are very stressed out, there’s a lot going on, having that conversation and really allowing people to focus on what is it that maybe I can’t do anymore I think is also a really healthy conversation to have and helps a lot with morale as we look to shifting and changing services. And I see that Amanda had her hand up, so I will pass it to her.</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> I have insight as a person who is supervised. And my supervisor has biweekly check in meetings with us, and prior to that meeting she has us fill out a form. And on that form she asks us these questions like what work have you completed since your meeting? Just so we’re all on the same page about what work is getting done. What barriers or challenges did you encounter in completing this work?</div><div>And then, you get to make a list of do you have work that’s consistently ongoing. And then, she asks us what work we’ll be starting, if we’re going to start up something new. And then, what barriers or challenges do we anticipate moving forward? So constantly thinking about what sort of barriers and challenges are we facing as individuals she’s supervising and how can she help eliminate those.</div><div>And being very, very transparent about it and the last question is what support do you need from me, colleagues in your department, colleagues in the library or colleagues across the university? And how can I help you make those connections? So also thinking about how to connect folks together, and thinking about what other expertise do you need that you don’t have? And how can I help you get access to that expertise to do your job?</div><div>Was the one thing that I wanted to add, but Karen also sparked something else for me with thinking about getting things taken off of your plate. So for example, one of the things that was really difficult for me at Penn State was running a really successful, in my opinion, grant program and at the end I had 37 publishing projects on my plate. At the same time, I was also being expected to do one-shot librarian instruction, which just takes up all the time in the world.</div><div>And so, I consistently, consistently advocated to get instruction taken off of my plate, because it doesn’t strategically align with my work. It’s just something everyone in the department does it. But it doesn’t strategically align with my work. I don’t have a student-facing position. I don’t interact with students, students benefit from the byproduct of the work that I am doing by being able to have access to better materials and to have cost savings.</div><div>But my user group is faculty, and my instruction should be doing instruction with faculty. And so I advocated for a really long time and did eventually get that taken off of my plate. So thinking strategically about what fits into the category of what you’re doing and what doesn’t, because to me doing just general library instruction just seems so nonsensical for a position that isn’t student-facing at all.</div><div>And it was really hard for me to switch mindsets, to go between this is instruction for students and it’s very, very different to this is how I want to teach open pedagogy to faculty.</div><div><strong>Elizabeth:</strong> And I’m just going to throw a couple of things out there, too. Karen mentioned when someone leaves, they use that as an opportunity to re-evaluate. That’s something that we’ve done here at my university. We, the library in the last three years has literally re-evaluated every single system that we use. And we evaluated it not based on the end user’s experience, but we evaluated it as a staff user experience.</div><div>So that we could look at things that we had to do all the time, that were taking a lot of time. So for my people it was managing electronic resources and how many different systems we were using to do that. And the answer was four, we were using four systems that were expensive, so it was wasting my money, it was wasting my time, it was wasting my staff’s time.</div><div>And so we shifted to an all-in-one system, to where everything is managed in the same place. Cataloging happens in the same place, electronic resource management, ordering, all of it happens in a centralized location. This saved us hours, literally over a single workday’s worth of work every single week. So these tasks weren’t things that were going to go away.<br>These were not tasks that we could say no to.</div><div>But we found a way to make them better, to where the staff was happier with the work that they were able to accomplish in less time. And it did free us up for those other projects that were coming at us from other departments and from the administration that we were not going to be allowed to say no to, that were now the library’s domain and we had to accomplish these things.</div><div>So we knew there were things coming we couldn’t say no to, so we had to find things that we could change. And we were doing a lot of things that no one could tell me why we did them the way we did. No one could tell me why having triplicate copies of something was important. No one could tell me any of this because it was just the way things were always done.</div><div>And so, I think that evaluation and understanding the goals and how your processes fit in with those goals allow you to look at something and go, “No, this is not working for us anymore.” Because it’s not always about your time, it’s sometimes about how your time is spent on tasks that have to happen. And so, you need to be able to really evaluate those sorts of things too so that you’re not having to say no I can’t do this, no I can’t do this, no I can’t do this.</div><div>Because these things that are remedial take up so much time in our world that there’s no time for anything that will allow us to grow. So we’ve had three years’ worth of evaluation and the only system we have that is the same now is our records management system, and that’s being evaluated right now, so it may change this summer.</div><div>Literally we have changed our repository, we have changed our cataloging module, we have changed everything that has to do with technical services so that we can then take on tasks that are being given to us. So I just think that evaluation is such an important and overlooked part of all of this process.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Elizabeth. I think taking on so much that you can get to a point where you have less is a long-term strategy. Abbey has a question in the chat that I’ll read out here, unless Abbey, you wanted to go ahead and unmute. I saw your hand was up there for a while, too?</div><div><strong>Abbey:</strong> You’re good, you can do it.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Okay, something I was talking about earlier today was the sort of high of saying yes, how do you temper your excitement and remind yourself internally to say no to things when you’re very organically pulled toward a yes or even towards self-pitching yourself into more work?</div><div><strong>Amanda:</strong> I would say stop and take a minute to reflect. Don’t answer yes in the moment. So if you can start practicing to not say yes to things while you’re in the room with somebody and instead say something like, “You know, this sounds like a really great idea. I need to check the workload that I have on my plate, I will get back to you this afternoon with an answer via email.”</div><div>So that gives you time to disengage from that highly dopamine situation, where you’re getting all the serotonin and the dopamine, so that you feel really high and excited. And give yourself time to reflect and see if it actually works into your schedule.</div><div><strong>Elizabeth:</strong> Yeah, I throw my supervisor under the bus with those. I totally, I do, I’m going to be really honest. I go, “You know, that sounds really interesting, I do need to check with my supervisor and make sure that’s going to align with what it is that we’re currently focusing on. If you’ll give me some time to speak with my administration, I would be happy to get back with you later.”</div><div>And that way, if it’s something that I actually am super excited about and I really want to do it and it does align with our goals, I then can use that opportunity when I do speak to my supervisor, because I’m not just saying I’m going to do it. I actually schedule a meeting and I go talk to them and I go, “Look, this has come up. I think this would be great for this reason, this reason, this reason.</div><div>But with all of the other tasks on my plate right now, there’s just no way that I can do that. What can we do to make this happen? Is there someone else that could take on this piece, which really doesn’t have anything to do with my job, but that I took on because there wasn’t anyone else at the time to do it? Could we transition that to someone that it’s more suited for so that I can do this super exciting really wonderful thing?”</div><div>And I know I’m going to tell you right now, I work for some of the best people I have ever met in my life. I am blessed when it comes to that. My administration, both of my ADs and our director, who is also a vice provost, so that gives us a lot more clout on campus, they are incredible people whose entire focus is ensuring their staff grows and is happy about how they are growing.</div><div>It is really, really easy for me to say, “I’ve been asked to do this, I don’t want to do this, please don’t make me do this.” And they will have my back on it. But in the exact opposite, when I go, “I really think we should do this, this is amazing, let’s do this.” They have my back there, too. So I think you need to build that kind of relationship with the people that you do answer to that help you make those decisions and can help control how much access other people have to you.</div><div>And make sure that you’re all on the same page there. I try to do it with the people that answer to me. They’ll come to me and go, “Hey, I want to go to this conference.” And I’m like, “Okay, great. I would love to send you to this conference for a week, tell me why you want to go. Let’s talk about what else you have going on that week that maybe we can…” But at the same time, I want them to be happy, I want them to learn, I want them to grow.</div><div>So it’s all about open conversations and finding that balance and the people that you can pull in that can support you in either decision, where you get that yes or you have to say no whether you want to or not.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Sorry, Karen, do you want to add to that?</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> I was just going to say one of the things we also have is a form. So if somebody says I have this really great publishing idea or I want to publish this open textbook, I say, “That’s awesome, here’s our form, fill this out.” And then that allows us to see how well thought out their plan is, how well thought out their open textbook publishing is. And then, I’m not the one saying yes or no, the form and the information provided is what is guiding us.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you and I think Abbey’s question also relates to something we were talking about earlier which is it can be easier in a mediated way through email or through a form, but it can be hard I think to really interrupt that reflexive response when you’re in person. I feel that it’s like we spend so much of our job wanting to engage with people and build community and somebody comes and says, “Hey, I have this idea.”</div><div>The yes is out of my mouth before I realized I was going to say it sometimes. And so, just trying to even just getting the word maybe in there, I think, would be an improvement. Maybe. And then, buying some time. So Kim has to step away a few minutes early, but I think we might have a second or two to just look at her comment in the chat, which I think was related to something Karen was saying.</div><div>And Kim mentioned the struggle with removing barriers for staff and that the way she sometimes does that is by taking on the work herself and looking for strategies in these situations to do that better. In the last couple of minutes we have here do any of our guests have thoughts on that?</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> I think what Johanna talked about in doing the assessment is really what’s key because sometimes taking stuff off of somebody’s plate is really about discontinuing a service. And sometimes discontinuing a service is okay if you have the metrics to really support the reason for it. So it’s not just about because this is something I also struggle with as well, it’s not just about saying what can I take off your plate and then having me do it.</div><div>It’s more about what can I take off your plate and why should we be taking this off your plate? And sometimes it may need to get distributed to somebody, but other times it just might be discontinued.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> And with that, we are just about at the hour. So thank you to Karen, Amanda, Elizabeth, and Johanna for joining us for this great conversation. Not just strategic but also validating. And thank you to Apurva and Monica and the Rebus Community for 50 great sessions. We will not be having Office Hours in December, but we look forward to regrouping and seeing all of you again in 2022. Anything anyone would like to add before we adjourn?</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Hope you all have a lovely restful break, whatever, however long that is for you over the holidays. Take care everybody and thank you to all of our speakers, but also all of our participants and attendees today for what has been a wonderful discussion. Take care everyone.</div><div>END OF VIDEO</div><h2>Chat Transcript</h2><div>00:16:15 Kim Hoffman (she, her): THANK YOU for offering this session!<br>00:17:23 Apurva Ashok: <a href="mailto:contact@rebus.community">contact@rebus.community</a><br>00:18:30 Apurva Ashok: Let’s get to 100!<br>00:18:47 Amanda Larson: The Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples.<br>00:18:48 Jonathan Poritz (he/him): joining from the traditional territory of the Ute peoples.<br>00:18:53 Monica Brown (she/her/hers): I want to respectfully acknowledge the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, on whose land I currently occupy today. I’m tuning in from Redmond, Oregon. Central Oregon is the unceded territory of the Tenino, Wyam, Dock-Spus, Tygh, and Paiutes peoples. I thank them for allowing me to live and work on this land.<br>00:19:18 Kim Hoffman (she, her): Seneca and Haudenosaunee<br>00:19:32 D’Arcy Hutchings (she/her): I am joining from the ancestral and current lands of the Dena’ina people (settler/colonizer name being Anchorage, Alaska).<br>00:20:11 Abbey Elder: Coming in from Iowa State University in Ames, the traditional home of the Meskwaki, Baxoje, and Ioway peoples, many of whom are still here today, though certainly not as many as should be, thanks in no part to our own university!<br>00:20:22 Abbey Elder: *in large part<br>00:23:58 Apurva Ashok: Do folks on the call today have similar conceptions of success? Is it defined in the same way by your institutions/employers?<br>00:24:27 Apurva Ashok: And thanks, Johanna – you’ve raised such great points!<br>00:25:25 Amanda Larson: <a href="https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/">https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/</a><br>00:25:42 Monica Brown (she/her/hers): Thanks for sharing this, Amanda ?<br>00:25:55 Cathy Germano: Thank you.<br>00:25:56 Cara Stone (she/her): Fobazi Ettarh is a.maz.ing<br>00:28:53 Abbey Elder: Amanda, you are an absolute rock star and I appreciate you sharing these experiences and examples with us<br>00:30:13 Kim Hoffman (she, her): Are there helpful worksheets/guides that can help me and my staff to think through all these points? This conversation is happening at a perfect time.<br>00:31:01 Amy Hofer (she/her): @Kim I like that question. I’m managing ppl in fixed-term positions and I want to think about supporting them in saying no as well.<br>00:31:46 Apurva Ashok: Good question, Kim! I’ve lined it up for our discussion soon. Please feel free to keep the questions coming.<br>00:32:40 Abbey Elder: Oh yes! “Before we can look at the second edition, you need to finish the first edition” is a sadly common conversation but welcome to have excited members of the community<br>00:32:40 Apurva Ashok: So far so good, Elizabeth! No construction noise.<br>00:35:50 Monica Brown (she/her/hers): That’s such a smart strategy, Elizabeth!<br>00:38:17 Amanda Larson: It’s good to have it in writing too.<br>00:38:46 Abbey Elder: Especially when the reasoning is written out! That way, if you question “why did I say no?” later you can remind yourself<br>00:38:47 Veronica Howard: YAAASS! Get it in writing!<br>00:38:56 Michael Shiflet: I’ve definitely noticed that the more formal/generic the messaging, the less pushback we receive.<br>00:39:40 Abbey Elder: (The same reason we document why we have to cancel journals/database subscriptions, honestly)<br>00:42:09 Apurva Ashok: I need a copy of this decision tree for myself, and to share more widely!<br>00:42:26 Cathy Germano: Good advice here! Decision tree, planning and patience!<br>00:43:09 Kim Hoffman (she, her): <a href="https://twitter.com/BatPyrope/status/1336461967356293122/photo/1">https://twitter.com/BatPyrope/status/1336461967356293122/photo/1</a><br>00:43:43 Apurva Ashok: Thank you, Kim! ?<br>00:45:28 Karen Bjork (she/her): <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6040042">https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6040042</a><br>00:47:12 Amanda Larson: iterate often!<br>00:48:22 Karen Bjork (she/her): <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QAXIK9AHDeO1ViO4VY9-2jRXPMUY8yQgD6bwxBZzV7U/edit">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QAXIK9AHDeO1ViO4VY9-2jRXPMUY8yQgD6bwxBZzV7U/edit</a><br>00:48:40 Veronica Howard: I love when a shared resource has a big reveal. ?<br>00:50:05 Apurva Ashok: ?? thank you!! Now is the time for questions and broader conversation, so please feel free to unmute or post your question in the chat.<br>00:52:27 Abbey Elder: Something I was talking about earlier today was the sort of “high” of saying yes. How do you temper your excitement and remind yourself, internally, to say no to things when you’re very organically pulled toward a “yes” or even toward self-pitching yourself into more work?<br>00:53:21 Cara Stone (she/her): +1 Abbey!<br>00:59:55 Cathy Germano: Amanda I love those questions. Could you share them in written form? I want to make sure I got them all. We are trying to do something like this in my unit.<br>01:00:45 Apurva Ashok: We’ll have them in the transcript, Cathy – which will be linked to from the YouTube recording: <a href="https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_HCuxp85e36BTNh9ei2QqBL_aqu3Q-F2">https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_HCuxp85e36BTNh9ei2QqBL_aqu3Q-F2</a><br>01:01:15 Cathy Germano: Awesome<br>01:01:30 Apurva Ashok: @Abbey, feel free to jump in next if you wanted, and ask your question too!<br>01:01:54 Abbey Elder: I just wanted to jump back to my earlier question in the chat<br>01:02:04 Apurva Ashok: It’s up next!<br>01:02:10 Abbey Elder: ?<br>01:02:20 Amy Hofer (she/her): @Amanda I really like the idea of of managers as removers of barriers for ppl that report to us to really leverage their time and talents.<br>01:02:38 Amanda Larson: I really appreciate that style of management<br>01:03:03 Amanda Larson: it also reiterates to me that my expertise is a valuable resource<br>01:03:15 Amanda Larson: that is being used strategically<br>01:03:17 Kim Hoffman (she, her): I often struggle with “removing barriers” for my staff as taking on that work for myself. I need strategies to work these situations out in better ways.<br>01:04:17 Amanda Larson: I definitely wouldn’t encourage you to add it to your plate! Maybe evaluate whether it makes sense for that work to be happening right now? Or if it could be more broadly distributed.<br>01:04:19 Apurva Ashok: @Kim, that’s a struggle for sure. Taking something off someone’s plate does not always require it be added to yours. As our panelists have said, sometimes we might need to ‘wait’ on that a bit.<br>01:05:48 Monica Brown (she/her/hers): That’s been a huge strategy for me to temper my excitement a bit: avoid agreeing in the moment!<br>01:07:11 Amanda Larson: that’s a great strategy for pitching work you DO want to do and getting on your supervisor’s radar<br>01:07:17 Amy Hofer (she/her): @Elizabeth – that really resonates with me! Sometimes even just writing out the thing for my supervisor or HR or whoever to review makes me realize that it’s a hard no.<br>01:10:01 Kim Hoffman (she, her): I need to step out a few minutes early. This has been really great. Thank you all!<br>01:10:05 Abbey Elder: Or worse, the words “and how about this, too!”<br>01:11:11 Karen Lauritsen: Totally! It’s the “yes and…” – good in improv, not always IRL<br>01:11:30 Abbey Elder: You all have been wonderful, thank you for your time here. I know it was an extra “yes,” so really appreciate it ?<br>01:11:41 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thank you, what a great topic!<br>01:11:43 Monica Brown (she/her/hers): This has been such a rich conversation! Thank you everyone!<br>01:11:44 Jonathan Poritz (he/him): thanks!<br>01:11:45 hristovar: Thank you!<br>01:11:48 Gabby Hernandez: Thank you all this was wonderful!<br>01:11:50 Apurva Ashok: Thank you all – speakers and attendees! And the OEN!!<br>01:11:54 Amy Hofer (she/her): Wow, congrats on 50!!!<br>01:12:13 Cathy Germano: Thank you. Grateful to all.<br>01:12:17 Amy Hofer (she/her): Apurva and Karen I just had a topic idea!<br>01:12:19 Veronica Howard: Thank you!<br>01:12:22 Cara Stone (she/her): Thanks, all!</div><div><br></div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/412021-11-23T12:00:00Z2022-04-07T20:49:02ZOEN at Open Publishing Fest: Open Publishing Survey Results<div><em>Watch the </em><a href="https://youtu.be/lHvvAbQud4U"><em>video recording</em></a><em> of this Open Publishing Fest 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.</em><br><br><em>Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please </em><a href="mailto:joh20849@umn.edu"><em>contact Tonia</em></a><em>.</em><br><br></div><h2>Audio Transcript</h2><div><br></div><h3>Open Publishing Fest: Open Publishing Survey Results</h3><div><br><strong>Speakers:</strong> </div><ul><li>Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)</li><li>Jennifer Pate (OER and Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of North Alabama)</li><li>Elaine Thornton (Associate Professor and Librarian of Open Education and Distance Learning, University of Arkansas)</li></ul><div><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Hello, and welcome to the Open Publishing Fest. My name is Karen Lauritsen. I'm publishing director with the Open Education Network.<br><br>I am joined today by Barb Thees, who is the community manager. If you don't already know the Open Education Network, we're a community of higher education professionals working together to make education more equitable through open education. We're based at the University of Minnesota in the United States, and if you'd like to learn more about us we'll drop a link in the chat at open.umn.edu/oen.<br><br>Today we're going to talk with Elaine Thornton who is associate professor and librarian of open education and distance learning at the University of Arkansas, and Jen Pate, OER and scholarly communications librarian at the University of North Alabama.<br><br>Together they recently collaborated on an OER publishing survey, and I'm very excited that we are among some of the first to hear about what they discovered about the OER publishing landscape that so many of us are working in. I prepared several questions for Elaine and Jen. Of course, your questions are welcomed and encouraged, so please feel free to jot them in the chat as they occur to you.<br><br>And really, this conversation is intended to be informal. It's modeled after the monthly tea time sessions we have in the OEN Publishing Cooperative where we discuss topics related to publishing OER.<br><br>And just a couple more housekeeping details, as I mentioned, we are recording this session. It will be available in a couple of weeks. We have enabled live transcription, I believe. If you don't see the option there, and you would like it, please let us know in the chat and we'll make sure that that is set up properly.<br><br>And we are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all attendees, so please join us in creating that safe and constructive space.<br><br>I'm now happy to introduce Elaine and Jen, and let's just start with professional collaborations and talking about that, in general, and what brought you two together. It can be difficult to establish a professional collaboration, especially now that we're all working, or most of us are working remotely some of the time, all the time. So tell us how you established your relationship, how you got to know each other and embark on this collaboration.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Okay, well, I will start. So, I am an instructor for the OEN's OER Librarian Certificate program, and we're set up in a cohort model. And Jen was assigned to my cohort. Not this past program, but the program before, so that was 2020 through...or 2019 through 2021. So that's, you know, how we came to be connected, was through that certificate program. And you know, have just kind of kept in touch on Twitter since then.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Yeah, she was my cohort leader. She was fantastic. She's one of my OER heroes. So, yeah, so we kept in touch afterwards and mainly through Twitter and, you know, I've already always appreciated the research that Elaine has done, so yeah.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And what inspired the two of you to decide to do a survey of your higher ed colleagues about OER publishing?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>So it actually all started about this time last year. So, Jen's participation in the program had ended, and she was a superstar of course, earned her certificate. And I was reading an article by Ariana Santiago and Lauren Ray called Navigating Support Models for OER Publishing Case Studies from the University of Houston and the University of Washington. And I'm always intrigued by, you know, what other people are doing, you know.<br><br>As you all probably know, in the open community there's a lot of communication on listservs and the back and forth, and I know, you know, I'm at a certain point in our program here where publishing has really taken off. And so, I'm always interested to read about what other people are doing. So I enjoyed reading their article and one of the things they talked about was kind of the need for a broader discussion on libraries publishing OER.<br><br>And so I read that and I saw a call for proposals for some conference or something, and I sent Jen a note and said, hey you want to do this? Because I knew at her school. She had just kind of started thinking about publishing. And I thought, I thought maybe we'd make a good combination since I was already into kind of guiding some publishing projects and she was kind of just getting started. And it's always great to work with someone else on these kinds of projects because you have different thoughts, you know, different questions come to mind. And so, that's kind of how we got started, and that was about a year ago. So we've been kind of working on this off and on for a year now.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>So yeah, it was November of 2020. I actually told the lady last night, we were talking and I said I actually looked it up in Twitter when she sent me the message on Twitter saying, Hey do you want a partner on this? And it was this month.<br><br>And at my university we formalized our OER program, and in May of 2020 we launched our stipend program which is like a grant program for faculty so that they can adopt, adapt, or create OER. And at that point we were still really working with faculty who are adopting or adapting OER, but we knew that actually publishing original OER was coming, so it couldn't have been more timely for me.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And so, could you please both talk a little bit more about your roles in OER publishing at your institutions?<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Sure. So, like I said, our publishing program is emerging. We currently have two books that faculty are working on. We have another book that was published but it's not true OER. It was a geography OER that's published within the geography platform that the instructor was using, so it's not shareable in the same sense.<br><br>But we do have two books that should be published in the spring. One went through our OER program, so I'm acting as the project manager for it. I have put it on the Rebus Community. I'm about to put up the call for participation for proofreaders and copy editors and peer reviewers for that book, because the writing is done on it.<br><br>For the other book, though, because it didn't go through our OER program, I'm acting in more of an advisory capacity, and that's a biology microbiology lab manual. So I'm not as hands on with that one. So right now, where we're at because our program is emerging is we're still kind of defining our role as the OER working group, and my role as the OER librarian in how we manage these projects.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Mm hmm.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>So here at the University of Arkansas I manage all of our OER incentive programs which include kind of our OER publishing projects. So, I think we have eight or so already published open textbooks that are in use in courses here at the university, and we have, maybe, like eight or so creation and adaptation projects that are in process right now. So we have some of our OER in our institutional repository.<br><br>We also have a Pressbooks platform, and so I handle all the day-to-day, month-to-month management of those projects onboarding the authors, providing the workshops and training for the faculty authors, onboarding them with Pressbooks and then just answering any questions that they have going forward.<br><br>We provide incentives. We do not provide editorial services. They're supposed to use money from their incentives to get those services if they need them. But sometimes I'm able to connect them with others on campus who can help them with those kinds of needs, so you know, it's kind of juggling the incentive program, the project management for each project, and trying to recruit new projects as well.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Thank you. You both described such a wide variety of roles that I think are very common in the OER publishing landscape, and we're really just about to find out with your survey results. Can you, before we get to the big reveal...how did you organize your survey outreach? How did you get the word out there?<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Everything that we've done on this project, because Elaine is in Arkansas and I'm here in Alabama, we've done through collaborative Google Docs. So, together we wrote a call for participation in a Google Doc, and you know, just commented back and forth on it until we had it right where we wanted it. Elaine arranged to do the IRB on it because we wanted to make sure it was an IRB certified or exempt survey. And then we literally opened a Google Doc and just kind of dumped every listserv that we could think of, that we participated in, or that we knew of.<br><br>And then we divided and conquered, and so we put in the date that we put out the initial call for participation. And then about a week later, we did a second call and we dated that so that we kind of could track, you know, who had posted where and when we had posted so that we weren't overlapping and over saturating because that gets annoying. So we wanted to make sure that we were as robust as possible, so we tried to hit, of course, OEN, LibOER, CCOER, and the like. I even sent it out to, I also manage our institutional repository here, so I put it out on the IR managers' listserv and just tried to spread it out as far as we could to get as robust of participation as we could.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>And because we're both librarians, it was heavily kind of weighted toward librarian focused listserves. But you know, we were open to feedback from anybody who was involved in OER publishing.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>And primarily North American as well.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And anything via social media or did you focus on listserves?<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Yeah, I tweeted. I think Elaine tweeted it as well. So yeah, we have an OER channel for UNA and tweeted it from there, and from my personal account.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And I don't have a sense, I mean, I wonder what the audience size of those lists are if they were to be aggregated and then de-duped. It would be interesting to know how many librarians and other professionals are being reached in that way. Who did you hear from? You mentioned librarians...was there anything you noted regionally, or were you able to track, you know, response rates from listserves?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>So yeah, it was an anonymous survey so we didn't, you know, ask for their identification or anything. We did have a space that could kind of identify someone, for people who wanted to share their policy. So if they had OER publishing policy they could put a link into that or, you know, give us information so that we could get it from them later.<br><br>But that didn't happen very often because I think, for one reason, I think a lot of people are still trying to figure out what their policies are.<br><br>So you know, it was an anonymous survey, but based on some of the questions that were asked, we found that we had a lot of scholarly communications librarians, OER librarians, and even a few publishing librarians answering. Also some library administrators, so you know, the majority of people who answered the survey were librarians.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And before we hear broadly what you found out, were there any surprises that jumped out at you right away?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>I think...there weren't a lot of surprises. I was kind of surprised by that publishing librarian title. That was one that I wasn't familiar with and hadn't heard much about before.<br><br>You know, I was surprised by some of the answers regarding kind of the cross campus collaboration, like who some of the librarians or the publishing...who the collaborators were on campuses. You know, lots of people said instructional design and university presses. Some said other, and I don't think we had a space for them to identify who that other was.<br><br>So you know, some things you don't think about when you're doing a survey that you can think about when you come back around.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Right. And that's one of the things that Elaine and I have talked about at length, is doing a follow-up, more of a qualitative survey to fill in some of the gaps, because in some instances when we asked about platforms, for example, and people would say, Oh, we're using Pressbooks, or we're using our IR, we didn't have a space for them to tell us. You know, are they using a hosted Pressbooks, or are they using a one off instance? You know, like the faculty is just doing their own book sort of thing in Pressbooks.<br><br>What IR platform are they in? A digital commons, or are they DSpace, or are they Ubiquity? Where are they? You know, what kind of repository software are they using as well? So, just by doing the research we found, kind of, gaps in our own research that we want to go back and fill in.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Which is sort of exciting. You know, once you start digging to see, like, oh there's all these different avenues and questions to continue to pursue. Well, tell us more about what you found.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>We found that in most of the programs that are run by libraries, the duties are falling to the schol comm or an OER librarian, and like Elaine said, some publishing librarians, and that's about 45%.<br><br>And what we also found that I think is not shocking at all, is that most of them, like over 45% of them said that, I'm sorry, not 45%...almost half of the respondents said that they were self-taught. So they didn't have any kind of formal training which isn't surprising, because this is an emerging field and you know, there are not a ton of formal education things happening in library schools about scholarly communications in general, whether it's open access or open education publishing or open pedagogy or open source software, it's that, like library schools are still catching up to what we're actually doing here out in the field.<br><br>We found that 30% of the publishing programs are actually being run by other units on campus whether it's a center for teaching and learning, or they actually have a publishing program on campus depending on their campus size.<br><br>About 5% are self-service, meaning faculty are completely on their own and do it on their own. They might come to the library for advice, but everything that's done as far as open education publishing is done by the faculty member who's creating the open education resource.<br><br>Pressbooks is the most used platform in this survey, with IRS coming in a very close second. I think it was like one response less. So this is one of the areas, like I said, where we really want to know more. Like, what IR platforms are you using to publish your OER?<br><br>And, in addition, for like the promotion and the dissemination, a lot of folks are using listservs. They are also just using their IR just to push it out there, OER Commons, and of course, the Open Education Network's Open Textbook Library is a big place for promoting and putting out their OER.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And I may have missed this. About how many responded?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>I think we had 102 completed.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Surveys, yeah.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And so, how do you imagine this information may inform our work as the OER publishing community as we move forward? You mentioned there's still sort of a lot more to learn, can you...<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Well, you know, so many things are self taught when it comes to OER. So many of the programs... There are some great programs out there. Again, I will shout out the Open Education Network's Open Education Certificate in Librarianship. That was incredibly beneficial for me to develop an action plan. Sparc also has a cohort model that they do for open education, and now AAC&amp;U also has a year-long institute on open that they're doing. And there are a few others that, you know, are supportive of open education, but not necessarily are open education, like getting your creative commons certification.<br><br>But other than that, there's no real formalized training. Especially, and for myself, being at a mid-sized regional university. And one of the things about my university is that we are the lowest funded university in the state per full-time enrolled student. And there's a lot of things that go into why our funding is so low. So when you have something like that, when you have smaller institutions, community colleges, lower funded institutions, it can be very, very difficult for people to take advantage of trainings.<br><br>It is very, very difficult to convince if you don't have an administration that's on board, you know, to convince them to pay thousands of dollars for you to go get a certificate somewhere. So these programs might be out of reach for these folks, and one of the things that we hope kind of comes out of the research that we're doing is that we can build a community of practice around OER. Like a more formalized community of practice, mentorships, developing a best practices for people who are publishing that would encompass whether you're at a large institution that has a huge publishing arm or whether you're at a small community college and you're self serve and you're doing it all yourself. That there would be something in there for everybody, because there is no one-size-fits-all.<br><br>That was one of the things, the big beacons that came out of this research is, there is no one-size-fits-all. You know, whether you're using GitHub or you're using Pressbooks, or you're using, you know, LaTeX, you're using any of these things, there's no one-size-fits-all. So it would be really great if we could develop a community of practice around publishing sort of like, I think of it in terms of what Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa have done with the Open Pedagogy Notebook where they have that website where they're building a community of practice and people are sharing out their materials. If we could build something similar to that with, you know, a guidebook or best practices book of OER publishing that people who don't have that formalized training from either their graduate school or from, you know, going through the open education program could refer to when they get stuck.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Yeah, and we did have a few people who specifically mentioned published focus programs, like the OEN Pub 101. We had two or three people who mentioned that one. A few people mentioned the Library Publishing Coalition program, so you know, even if you've gone through some of those broader kind of open education cohorts you may still want more just from the publishing aspect of it.<br><br>So, you know, our goal is to really hone in on what are those things you need to know. Say you already have the basic knowledge of open and OER and how it all works, but what are those things that someone really needs to know or could really help someone as they're launching an actual publishing campaign on their campus. You know, what do they need to know to help the teaching faculty?<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>And that's where I was telling Elaine this last night. I'm currently working on a master's degree in instructional technology and design and I'm doing a course right now in adult education. And one of the things I have to do in this course is, I have to develop a self-directed learning experience.<br><br>And so I'm a big fan of work smarter not harder, so my self-directed learning experience is learning the Pressbooks platform so that when we get done with the proofreading, copy editing, and peer review of the one of the books that we have, the one that I'm doing the project management for, I will be able to move it into Pressbooks very easily because I will have taught myself the platform. And so, yeah, so you know something like that is incredibly beneficial for, you know, especially when you're the sole person and that's, you know, it's me. And, you know, I have an OER working group, but as far as like the project management for OER, I'm it. I don't have a huge publishing division. I don't have a huge open education cohort in the library that I can, you know, rely on. It's me. And it's 50% of my job. The other 50% is scholarly communication, so you know, there's a lot of balancing that has to be done. So, if there was a guide to go to, to say you know this is how you do this, it would be incredible.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just been my observation too. And I'm sure so many people in this call, you know, you turn to a colleague and ask them a question about how they did something in OER publishing, you're going to get a very wide range of answers because there's a wide range of institutions and needs. And so while it makes perfect sense that programs need to be tailored to their context, it can make it difficult to establish communities of practice where, you know, people can find each other and support each other and find sort of the solutions that are going to work well for them. And definitely at the OEN, we've been focusing our attention on less funded institutions and how we can support publishing there should faculty want to do that. And, you know, listening to the ideas that the two of you have is really exciting to think about how we can work together to come up with that community of support. And so I look forward to staying tuned or let me know how, you know, we might work together as the OEN.<br><br>Anita has dropped a guide into the chat from the Rebus Foundation about publishing open textbooks, which is a guide that's out there that many find useful.<br><br>Anne Marie mentioned she identified and felt solidarity with funding issues that many are working with.<br><br>Cathy mentioned the benefit for institutions looking for librarians with publishing skills and I think that was in the context of, you know, certificate programs or other more formal learning opportunities. So thank you for your input in the chat everyone.<br><br>And I think this is a good opportunity, if you have questions about OER publishing at your institution, this is an informal place, this is really a time for you to ask Elaine and Jen and one another questions that are on your mind or ideas you have for how we can make this better together. So, while you think about that, did I interrupt? Did I hear a...No? Okay. What are your next steps with the data?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>So, kind of connected to what you're saying, too, about, you know, all these different approaches that combine with funding issues. We also want to be able to build a community where people can find free resources.<br><br>We know that, you know, you can use OER Commons to create OER if you don't have access to Pressbooks or even access to an institutional repository. So, you know, just being able to create some kind of community where that kind of information can be shared that's specifically about publishing. I mean. you know, we're all on all these other different listservs so you know, sometimes you lose things in those conversations.<br><br>But back to what our next steps are. So we initially presented on the survey at the NASET Conference earlier this year, and it was just a brief overview. Think it was a recorded presentation of kind of like four areas that we focused on in the survey. We talked about leaders, the leadership of the program, the training. Some of the things we were just talking about the training the librarians have going into the program or before they start publishing, publishing platforms and marketing. So those were the four things that we talked about in that presentation.<br><br>And we're actually editing our conference proceedings right now so that should come out next year, I believe. And so our plan is to get back into the data and finish analyzing what we have, and eventually publish a journal article that kind of covers the whole gamut of the questions that we asked and possibly include some focus groups or interviews before we write that article. So, you know, we're looking at maybe reaching out to some people to have some little conversations.<br><br>And we'd also like to use the gathered data, as we said before, as kind of a best practices template or guide so that others can, you know, contribute to it as well. So that's kind of where we are with that.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Great! Well, thank you for sharing your survey process and results so far. This is the time when we turn to everyone who has joined us to see what your questions are.<br><br>That concludes the questions that I had prepared for Elaine and Jen, so I'll hand things over. While you work on typing away in chat I will go ahead and just put a link actually to some of the publishing information for the OEN into the chat.<br><br>Some of the things that Elaine and Jen have identified as needs in the community, you might find a starting point for those on this page. For example, there's an OER publishing toolkit and that links to a lot of documents that you may need when starting a publishing program. For example, an MOU between the institution and the author, even things like spreadsheets for tracking the images used in the document. And those have been created by the community.<br><br>There's also different links to guides and so on, so I hope that may be useful to any of you who are getting started. Elaine also mentioned the Pub 101 program. We will be launching a new one in 2022. This is a totally free and rather informal program, so you do not finish with the certificate, but you do get to know some other people who are working in publishing and have the opportunity to ask questions and familiarize yourself with different resources that are out there. And that's totally free, so if that's something that you would like to be added to the list when we have it together, I'll just drop my email in there, and you can let me know that you're interested in joining us.<br><br>So, what questions do you have for Elaine and Jen? Or Elaine and Jen, is there anything you'd like to add that I didn't ask?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Well, I have a question for the participants while they're thinking of their questions for us. I know we didn't talk about every area, but if you have any particular questions or thoughts about OER publishing that you think we might...avenues we might chase, we'd love to know about it.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>And I want to just thank you, Karen, for the links, and Anita for the links as well.<br><br>I'm a big fan of the Rebus platform. As somebody who has participated in other people's projects on it and has now put my first project on the Rebus platform, I am so excited about using a platform that allows community participation like that. And I'm really excited that we have something like that, especially for smaller institutions to be able to put out a call to have people...<br><br>One of the books that I'm working on is a book on music theory, and I know nothing about music theory. So for me to try to reach out and find people who could participate in that project would be very, very difficult to do.<br><br>So yeah, I'm thrilled to see that people from Rebus are here, and thank you so much for the work that you do.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Feel free to unmute if you prefer to ask your question that way.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>I'll also add that if anybody would be interested in participating in the qualitative follow up that Elaine and I are planning on doing, feel free to email either myself or Elaine and let us know that you would be open to being interviewed about your publishing program.<br><br>We would love to reach out to you when when we're at that stage, which will probably be later. Later...<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Like next year.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Yes, sometime in the spring. Yes, that's where we're at. This is November. If I make it through November, it'll be great. I'm in the middle of migrating our institutional repository platform so that's got all of my brain energy right now.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Well, I have not seen...oh there, we have a question from Anne Marie, primarily for Jen: Do you think there's a need for "OER Publishing on a Shoestring Budget" community? I would take part.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Yes, absolutely. I think one of the things that Elaine and I have talked about a lot is the fact that if, you know, like the the Rebus guide to publishing and the work that OEN has done toward publishing is great, I mean they're fantastic resources. But when we talk about developing a best practices manual it would be something that would have...that would work within whatever. You could find something in that that would work for where you're at as far as the size of the department. If it's, you know, you half time, or if it is you have seven people working in your open education.<br><br>You know, I always look at programs at places like Oregon and Ohio and Georgia, and I'm like, man, God I'd love to have this resource.<br><br>But yes, absolutely, you know within the best practices...okay, you're small, you're underfunded, you know, anything that you could possibly... You know, whatever category you would fit in, large institution, small institution, community college, technical college, there would be something there for you.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>And, even in cases where you have funding to support faculty, you know it can still be a challenge when you're the only person devoted to helping them publish, you know. And you don't have you know, support within your department to help with that process, because really doing this kind of work is pretty labor intensive because you have to give a lot of individual attention to the faculty author. So, you know, you can only have so many projects going on and I think just kind of maybe some guidance on how to juggle when you have multiple projects and how to make sure that, you know, any funding your institution is spending on this is giving you a good return on investment because you know some administrator's going to ask you that. So what kinds of things can you think of upfront to kind of put in place?<br><br>And, you know, some of us say and think all these things in hindsight now, but, you know, just to be able to have that information out there so that others can think about it up front, I think, would be, you know, kind of a helpful piece of the guide or the best practices.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>I think just managing expectations is a huge thing, especially when you have a program that's growing as rapidly as the program that we have here. I mean, we are like I said, May of 2020 we launched our program and at this point we just funded another project that puts us at almost $400,000 a year in student savings. And that's just within just a little over a year and it's growing so rapidly and we've got the two textbooks that are in the works, and, you know, managing those expectations is something that that I'm really struggling with.<br><br>For example, the music theory book which is on the Rebus platform. I was talking with the author, Charles Brooks, and I said, I need this information for you so I can do the call for participation. And he's like, I'll get it to you next week. And I'm like, oh, I'm at a conference next week, but go ahead and send it to me and I'll try to work it in between conference sessions, and I couldn't. It just wasn't possible. <br><br>But yeah, it can be a really heavy lift, and so you need to be conscientious and aware of, you know, how much time some of these things are going to take because something you think is going to be a quick and easy fix might end up taking a lot of time.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>I could not agree more. Managing expectations and communicating frequently I think are two very helpful skills to develop. And one of the reasons why is related to how we started the call today, and that is that publishing, that word, has such broad definition. And you say the word publishing, one person is going to have one model in their mind and another person is going to have another model in their mind, and sometimes you don't realize that you're meeting sort of somewhere in this vast field of publishing definitions until you're many months into the project and it can be kind of a painful discovery that one person was thinking of publishing in one way.<br><br>And so, related to that and managing expectations, Lily has a question about editors, graphic designers, peer reviewers and asking about projects that involve stipends or monetary support. Do you provide the money in full to the authors or their departments, or are you involved in determining fund amounts for editors, graphic designers, peer reviewers.<br><br>Elaine, I remember you said you don't get involved. You give your authors the funding for them to work that out. Are there guidelines that you offer for, you know, typically a graphic designer might charge X amount?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>So this is not something that we went into in detail in our survey and that's part of the reason we want to do qualitative interviews because as long as I've been involved in open education with the last five years or so, I hear it's different everywhere, you know. Like the answers to this question for, you know, programs that provide incentives.<br><br>So at my institution, and it depends on who you're partnering with on your campus, too, so we partner with our global campus which is kind of our online learning unit. And that's where all of our instructional designers live so it's perfect for us. I love it, you know, because they provide a lot of good insight.<br><br>But it started with the vice provost for distance learning deciding, this is going to be the amount, so he said the amount because they were providing the funding when we started.<br><br>So...it's set to give the faculty extra compensation to create the projects. The amounts are not set to hire graphic designers or to hire editors or copywriters or anything like that. It's for the author, so we have to tell the authors that if you need those services, you must pay for them with your stipend.<br><br>That being said, we still try to provide as much support as possible. So, the OER program is myself, and then I have a graduate assistant who works with me and so he knows Pressbooks inside and out, so sometimes he will help, you know, faculty upload their Word docs or help with, kind of like, some design and layout type of thing. And then the other great thing about partnering with our global campuses, they have media. They have a media team and they have graphic designers on their staff.<br><br>And so, because there are partners in this we can kind of like get their help sometimes on projects, like if we need a cover design or we need some photographs, they can also help with, you know, shooting video... good quality video, but only as they have time because they have other projects they have to do.<br><br>You know, we encourage the faculty who are in our funded program to, you know, explore other avenues. For example, our college of agriculture has an ag media team where they have a hands-on kind of lab program for students to produce video. I mean, one of the things I do is produce video.<br><br>So I have a fashion design professor who is working on a basic sewing class, but she's been using that team of students. In fact, she didn't even take the funding. She put it into an account so that she can pay for that team's help with her media for her project. So you know, we can do creative things like that, and then also find ways to kind of showcase the work of our students on campus which kind of, you know, adds to their portfolio. So I always try to steer people in those kinds of directions as well.<br><br>And no, they don't get their funding all at once. We we pay it in increments so, you know, you get paid for every step that you complete in the project.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Incremental payments are important because you know we've already had an instance where a faculty member was unable to complete the project so she received her first stipend, but she's not receiving the final stipend because she just wasn't able to complete the project the way the contract that we had detailed. But one of the things about a question like this is, it really varies from place to place.<br><br>Ours is not with global campus, but I partner with our ETS, which is our ED tech department, and that is where our instructional designers live as well. We don't tell anybody how they have to spend their stipend either, but there may be places that do.<br><br>And that was just something that we didn't really go in depth with with our survey. You know, how do you determine how that funding is spent? Is it just to cover the time and effort for the faculty member or are they supposed to, you know, portion it out so that they can have professional copy editing or proof reading done on their projects? So yeah, that's something that we want to know more about.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Thanks for the question Lily, and if there's anyone here who would like to share how they do it on their campus in chat, please feel free.<br><br>Apurva is here with us from the Rebus Community. Hello! She has two questions: Besides wanting to learn more about platforms used, is there anything else you would both like to dig deeper into in the future survey and the qualitative interviews you've talked about? And did anything surprise you with the results you found so far?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Well, as I just mentioned, that whole thing with how people handout their funding and what they require, that's definitely something we would like to dig in deeper.<br><br>I don't think there were any major surprises just because, you know, we read the listserves all the time and we talked to a lot of people who are, you know, doing OER kinds of things.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Sustainability, I think, is one of the areas that we really want to look at...<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Definitely.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>...for future, in our next phase of the survey. You know, I saw Rebel just put in, revisions and upgrades. But yeah, who's sustaining it?<br><br>When Dr. Burke's music theory book is done and I put it on Pressbooks and it gets in the OEN Library and I put it on my institutional repository, and a year from now he decides he wants to change it. But maybe I'm no longer at this institution. What kind of policies and procedures do you have for the continued support of that published OER?<br><br>And I think that's one of the biggest problems that we have facing us in open education publishing because it is growing so rapidly that a lot of times you'll click on something and there's just link rot and that product that somebody says, Oh, this is really great. Sometimes when I'm searching for OER for a faculty member I might find somebody's lib guide that has great resources. But you know, a quarter of those links on their lib guide don't exist anymore. So how do we keep this sustainable? How do we make sure that you know when repositories migrate, or you decide you don't want to use Pressbooks anymore and you want to migrate it, but somebody's got a link to the Pressbooks. How are you redirecting them? Who is maintaining that, and how is that going to be maintained?<br><br>And, you know, what kind of institutional support do you have for your program? Is it something you're doing just within the library or do you have, like, I have full institutional support.<br><br>Our OER program is the brainchild of our provost who uses OER. He still teaches a class every semester, and he is the biggest advocate for OER on this campus and it's great to have that. And not everybody has that, but what do you do when you don't have institutional support or you don't have institutional funding?How can you, you know, if you wanted a full Pressbooks? That costs money.<br><br>And if you don't have institutional support to even give your faculty stipends to create the work, how are you going to publish that work if you don't have an IR or you don't have the ability to do a Pressbooks? Are you just going to put up a bunch of Word documents or in a Google drive? How are people managing all of these different things, and how can we make it sustainable?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>And even thinking about your own program because we all know with faculty they come, they go. I've already had one person... Our cinema book, he left the university this year. He created a resource that I still get adoption notices on all the time because it's for a basic film course.<br><br>You know that the textbook is usually very expensive, but you know he's no longer here, so just thinking about going forward...you know, if the links break in the book, who's going to maintain them? Now, right now, you know I'm still in touch with him, but that could change. So, you know, even thinking about the resources that are created in the updates to them, how do you get in a cycle for doing that?<br><br>You know, how do you let people know? We've started doing things like putting in a revisions page just so that the public will know when someone adds or changes something. So yeah, lots of things to think about.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Thank you both! Rebel has a couple of notes in the chat, as she mentions that the student fee at K-State really helped with sustainability.<br><br>And then, Rebel, you have consortium question mark, and I do not know what you're asking about that. Elaine, Jen, maybe that's enough for you to go on?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>We don't have a consortium.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>What was that?<br><br><strong>Rebel Cummings-Sauls: </strong>I was just asking if there is any way consortium support was thought about or how consortiums...obviously that's where I'm at right now, so how do we help you better at the institution level?<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Well, we don't have a consortium in our state, so you know it's not a consideration for us. I know others do and they get a lot of support that way.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>We have ACHE, which is the worst acronym in the world: the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. And through ACHE there's a consortium called NAAL, also not a great acronym, which is the Network of Academic Alabama Libraries.<br><br>Roll tide! So yeah, we have very little support from them, just because of funding, not because they're not eager to help.<br><br>NAAL and ACHE funded actually a bunch of librarians in the state to do the Creative Commons certification program which was great. And they did do, they brought I think Jeff from...<br><br>I don't think they brought Tiffany... I think it was just Jeff from Affordable Learning Georgia to the state to do a series of workshops about open education back in, I think 2019, 2018, 2019. And so that was great, and then they funded like high enrollment Gen Ed course OER and that's how we got started here. We received one of those grants for OER.<br><br>But yeah, I think programs like they have in Virginia, the VIVA and Lewis in Louisiana are fantastic supporters of OER, and I would love to see something at the program level within our consortia that would be committed to supporting OER.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>And so just to build on the spirit of Rebel's question, and I think what you were just saying, Jen, in terms of support at the program level, is there anything the two of you have at the top of your list that you personally would ask for in your work publishing OER, like if I had three wishes, it would be the following... This would make things so much better.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>I mean, I would. OER is my priority, but it is 50% of my job. I would love them to actually hire in the lines that we're missing in the library that we've not hired in because of funding issues so that I could hand off, so that we could have like a scholarly communications, you know open, you know, department and I could have somebody else who could handle the institutional repository open access stuff and I could just focus 100%. That would be all my three wishes in one, really, so that I would have more time to do this work because one of the things about where we're at is we are considered the affordable university in the state. We have banded tuition. We talk a lot about our student support and that's why the OER program is so important here. I just wish I had more time to do more with the OER program.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Think, if I had a wish it would be for more support from our Gen Ed programs. We have close to 30,000 students this year, and so, if we could make bigger inroads into our Gen Ed courses we would make, you know, the impact would be so much better.<br><br>We have just partnered kind of with our student success office to get them to kind of get behind supporting that. So, then we can then take that to psychology and sociology for their Gen Ed courses and say, hey you know student success is going to help provide some funding to get you to convert that class over.<br><br>But, you know, at a big school like this there's a lot of pushback because large seminars, you know the bells and whistles that come with the online or the publishers' textbooks and...<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Inclusive access.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Some of that too, and just, you know, I think you know, we just need, if we could just, my wish would be for all of those course coordinators, our department chairs in those areas to just wake up and decide they want to move all of their 1000-2000 level courses to OER.<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>That's a dream, isn't it.<br><br><strong>Elaine: </strong>Yeah!<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Well, sometimes it's good to wish and dream together, so thank you for sharing your ideas for a more better and more equitable higher ed OER publishing scenescape. And thank you Jen and Elaine for 1. Asking these questions of our colleagues and embarking on this survey, and 2. Sharing the early results with us.<br><br>We really look forward to learning more and, you know, working together on any follow ups. So I think since we're nearing the end of the hour, that it's time to wrap up in the chat.<br><br>I think both Jen and Elaine dropped their email. I also dropped mine. If you have further questions about OER publishing, let us know.<br><br>This is the first day of the Open Publishing Fest, so there's lots more programs and offerings to enjoy from around the world. Perhaps we will see one another again; there are two more OEN conversations next week. I hope to see you there.<br><br>And Elaine, Jen, anything you'd like to say in closing?<br><br><strong>Jennifer: </strong>Thanks for coming, and please reach out to us if you want to be part of the qualitative part of our survey. We would really love to hear from you.<br><br><strong>Karen: </strong>Thank you everyone. Farewell.<br><br>END OF VIDEO<br><br></div><h2>Chat Transcript</h2><div><br>00:14:05 Barbara R Thees: Here’s the hyperlink: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/oen">https://open.umn.edu/oen</a><br>00:21:08 Barbara R Thees: More information on the OEN’s Certificate in OER Librarianship that Elaine and Jennifer mentioned: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/otn/oercert/">https://open.umn.edu/otn/oercert/</a><br>00:21:39 Barbara R Thees: And great news! The next cohort is currently accepting applications through November 28th. Here’s the link to thee application:<a href=" https://umncehd.infoready4.com/#competitionDetail/1853721"> https://umncehd.infoready4.com/#competitionDetail/1853721</a><br>00:32:33 Anne Marie Gruber: Solidarity with that funding issue!<br>00:35:34 Cathy Germano: It makes me think of the benefit for institutions looking for librarians with these types of skills.<br>00:37:52 Anita Walz: This guide from the Rebus Foundation may be of interest: <a href="https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/">https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/</a><br>00:38:48 Anita Walz: Also of possible interest: <a href="https://about.rebus.community/textbook-success-program">https://about.rebus.community/textbook-success-program</a><br>00:41:56 Karen Lauritsen: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/oen/publishing/">https://open.umn.edu/oen/publishing/</a><br>00:43:08 Karen Lauritsen: <a href="mailto:klaurits@umn.edu">klaurits@umn.edu</a><br>00:44:08 Rebel Cummings-Sauls: TY<br>00:44:37 Apurva Ashok: Here’s a link to Jennifer’s project: <a href="https://www1.rebus.community/#/project/e5b5080b-0790-4e0f-a7f7-797b3f9f5e4f">https://www1.rebus.community/#/project/e5b5080b-0790-4e0f-a7f7-797b3f9f5e4f</a>. The Rebus website is also completely free to use!<br>00:45:54 Elaine Thornton: <a href="mailto:met022@uark.edu">met022@uark.edu</a><br>00:46:25 Anne Marie Gruber: Primarily for @jen, do you think there's a need for "OER Publishing on a Shoestring Budget" community? I'd take part! :)<br>00:46:32 Jennifer Pate: <a href="jpate1@una.edu">jpate1@una.edu</a><br>00:47:56 Lily Dubach: For projects that involve stipends or monetary support, do you provide the money in full to the authors (or their departments) or are you involved in determining fund amounts for editors, graphic designers, peer reviewers, etc?<br>00:48:11 Apurva Ashok: Two questions: Besides wanting to learn more about platforms used, is there anything else you both would like to dig deeper into in a future survey/those qualitative interviews? Did anything surprise you with the results you found so far?<br>00:57:30 Rebel Cummings-Sauls: revisions and upgrades?<br>00:58:05 Rebel Cummings-Sauls: Consortium?<br>00:58:46 Apurva Ashok: Thank you! There are great questions for future conversations - definitely areas we’re all asking/grappling with.<br>01:01:20 Rebel Cummings-Sauls: Our Student Fee at K-State really helped with sustainability<br>01:03:42 Rebel Cummings-Sauls: TY<br>01:08:16 Barbara R Thees: Open Pub Fest calendar: <a href="https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html">https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html</a><br>01:08:25 Anita Walz: Thank you!<br><br><br></div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/402021-10-29T12:00:00Z2022-07-08T16:33:16ZMember Profile: University of North Alabama’s Jennifer Pate<div>Jennifer Pate, Open Education Resources (OER) and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the <a href="https://www.una.edu/">University of North Alabama (UNA)</a>, recently sat down with the Open Education Network (OEN) to talk about her open journey – what spurred her initial interest in open education, how it has evolved to become her professional priority, and the impact of key relationships.<br><br><figure data-trix-attachment="{"content":"<span class=\"trix-attachment-spina-image\" data-label=\"Alt text\">\n <img src=\"https://open.umn.edu/rails/active_storage/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBdklNIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--854274ce979c5c67019d9714020368860c25c9db/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdCam9VY21WemFYcGxYM1J2WDJ4cGJXbDBXd2RwQXRBSGFRTFFCdz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJ2YXJpYXRpb24ifX0=--02875b9057e35a9b00aa9602d90b7271d5d60cf2/Jennifer-Pate-768x944.jpg\" />\n </span>","contentType":"Spina::Image"}" data-trix-content-type="Spina::Image" class="attachment attachment--content"><span class="trix-attachment-spina-image" data-label="Alt text">
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</span><figcaption class="attachment__caption"></figcaption></figure>Jennifer Pate, OER and Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of North Alabama</div><div>An avid traveler, Jennifer lived in the Middle East and former Soviet Republic of Georgia for several years before returning to the U.S. in 2009. Small artifacts now line her home bookshelves, reflecting the nature of this adventurous, destination-focused librarian who’s made it her goal to serve UNA students and faculty with OER. Her effort and enthusiasm have been instrumental in the university’s collaborative effort to build, expand, and promote a dynamic OER program.<br><br></div><div>What can we learn from her latest trek? Listen in.<br><br></div><div><strong>OER is part of UNA’s strategic plan. What’s the 2024 goal, and how are you working toward it?<br></strong><br></div><div>Our strategic plan, “Roaring with Excellence,” lists an aspirational goal to adopt, implement and utilize open educational resources in half of all our academic programs on campus.<br><br></div><div>With that in mind, we recently mapped out all the majors and minors on campus. Then we got all the book orders from each department on campus. We mapped those book orders for the individual instructors of courses required for completion of a major or minor. And now we’re going through that data, reaching out to anybody who didn’t have a book listed.<br><br></div><div>The data scrape will also help us mark courses in our catalog so students will know. We’ll be able to see programs that are heavily using OER, and those will be the ones we’ll try to target for potential Z-degree programs. It’s a lot of work on the front end, but I think it’s going to yield huge rewards for our university once we get through all the data.<br><br></div><div><strong>How did OER buy-in happen at UNA?<br></strong><br></div><div>We’re here to support our students; that’s a big thing for us. UNA offers banded tuition, which is a cost benefit for students. We have a huge comprehensive scholarship, financial aid, and support programs for students as well. To me, this was just a no-brainer. I asked, “Why aren’t we helping our students with textbook costs?” So, as part of my scholarly communications, I began advocating for OER.<br><br></div><div>Early on, I helped one of our education faculty apply for a research grant from the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE). The program essentially enabled faculty to measure and compare learning outcomes associated with OER versus traditional materials used in a single course.<br><br></div><div>Results from that experimental use of OER showed that GPAs were better and drop/fail/withdraw rates were lower in that course. It wasn’t a huge empirical study, but just that one small concentrated study in that one class showed OER made a difference. That’s what kind of kicked it all off.<br><br></div><div>We’re also very fortunate that we have a president and provost who are 100 percent behind OER. They not only fund our efforts, they teach classes with OER themselves. When our president writes his annual letter to faculty, he always talks about using OER. The provost funds UNA’s OER stipend program, and to date, we’ve funded 23 projects. Not a single proposal has been rejected – not one.<br><br></div><div><strong>Has your work been influenced by the OEN community?<br></strong><br></div><div>The <a href="https://open.umn.edu/otn/oercert/">Certificate in OER Librarianship</a> program offered through OEN really helped me solidify what we needed to do. As part of the 2020 cohort, I built my campus action plan – a clear, comprehensive document that defines smart goals for implementing OER. And those goals make it hard for people to say no because they show the amount of thought and energy you’ve put into this.<br><br></div><div>I initially learned about the program from Will Cross of North Carolina State who’s one of my OER champions. Will’s been a huge influence, speaking about OER at several UNA workshops and ultimately introducing me to the certification program and OEN community. Talking and working with Will motivated me to get involved.<br><br></div><div>The program also introduced me to Elaine Thornton of the University of Arkansas. As my mentor, Elaine walked me through the development of my smart goals. I had seven of them, five of which are now complete. Elaine and I are still in contact. We recently conducted a new study of OER publishing trends, and we’ll be sharing our findings at <a href="https://www.openpublishingfest.org/">Open Publishing Fest</a> in November.<br><br><figure data-trix-attachment="{"content":"<span class=\"trix-attachment-spina-image\" data-label=\"Alt text\">\n <img src=\"https://open.umn.edu/rails/active_storage/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBdk1NIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--39076e00979700664f381c190af0775d3823873d/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdCam9VY21WemFYcGxYM1J2WDJ4cGJXbDBXd2RwQXRBSGFRTFFCdz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJ2YXJpYXRpb24ifX0=--02875b9057e35a9b00aa9602d90b7271d5d60cf2/Open-Publishing-Fest-2021.jpg\" />\n </span>","contentType":"Spina::Image"}" data-trix-content-type="Spina::Image" class="attachment attachment--content"><span class="trix-attachment-spina-image" data-label="Alt text">
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</span><figcaption class="attachment__caption"></figcaption></figure>Jennifer and Elaine's presentation, "OER Publishing Survey Results," is part of Open Publishing Fest's 2021 lineup. Monday, November 8, 11:00 am CST.</div><div>Finally, this certification gave me the tools I needed to advocate for change in my job responsibilities. I presented my completed action plan to the provost, and said, “If I’m going to be able to focus on achieving these goals, we need to make it clear that OER is my job priority.” After key discussions, we were able to take instruction off my plate, position open education as the primary focus of my work, and revise my title to reflect that change.<br><br></div><div>I can’t say enough good things about the positives that have come out of my participation in the Open Education Network and their initiatives. Everyone I’ve met through the OEN has been amazing.<br><br></div><div><strong>Can you tell us a little more about the OER publishing research you and Elaine are conducting?<br></strong><br></div><div>Elaine and I are working to get an idea of what’s happening out in the landscape for people doing OER publishing programs or people working to build them.<br><br></div><div>With OER publishing, there’s no best practices written. There’s nothing out there because OER is still a relatively new field. What do you do, other than reaching out to people you know who have publishing programs, and saying, “How are you doing this?” Our survey is a great first step toward developing that set of best practices.<br><br></div><div>Elaine and I were strategic about how we disseminated the survey. We divided up the work and used librarian-dominated listservs to focus on OER publishing primarily at North American university libraries. We got pretty robust participation which leaves us better prepared to address questions like, “Why should we do this?” “How is it possible for me to do this?” “What is my role in this?” and more. Speaking for myself, as somebody who’s just moving into the publishing phase, the data makes me feel not so alone because there are a lot of people who are not real sure what they’re supposed to be doing.<br><br></div><div>Now that we have the quantitative data, we’d really like a little more qualitative information. That’s something we’ll probably talk about at the Fest, but we may follow up with individual interviews with people at different stages of the publishing process.<br><br></div><div><strong>What's on the horizon for UNA's OER program?<br></strong><br></div><div>As one of the next big pushes for our program, we’re looking at moving all our dual credit and early enrollment programs to OER. In the state of Alabama, we have this huge push for early college and dual enrollment credit, but the financial burden for all those textbooks falls solely on the parents and guardians, or the students themselves.<br><br></div><div>We’d also like to do a full student survey, similar to the one that’s done in Florida every couple years, to raise awareness of OER, get more student involvement, and see where our students are financially.<br><br><figure data-trix-attachment="{"content":"<span class=\"trix-attachment-spina-image\" data-label=\"Alt text\">\n <img src=\"https://open.umn.edu/rails/active_storage/representations/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBdlFNIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--7df5ee8a19ce751705dedf35a934a562870944a2/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdCam9VY21WemFYcGxYM1J2WDJ4cGJXbDBXd2RwQXRBSGFRTFFCdz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJ2YXJpYXRpb24ifX0=--02875b9057e35a9b00aa9602d90b7271d5d60cf2/last-whiteboard4-1536x1152.jpg\" />\n </span>","contentType":"Spina::Image"}" data-trix-content-type="Spina::Image" class="attachment attachment--content"><span class="trix-attachment-spina-image" data-label="Alt text">
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</span><figcaption class="attachment__caption"></figcaption></figure>Student responses to UNA's informal survey of textbook expenses.</div><div>We recently did an ad hoc whiteboard survey of students in the library, very informal. Results showed an average of over $300 a semester in textbook costs per student. Some noted that they could have used that money to buy medications or gas, so we know we have students who are struggling.<br><br></div><div>Another goal I really want is to push for a Z-degree, either a major or minor at the university. I’d like that to be part of the strategic plan. Oh, and we’ve got an award coming out now for our faculty OER adopters. The faculty award is another one of our next big things.<br><br></div><div><strong>And the next big thing for you?<br></strong><br></div><div>So, I’m almost halfway through the process of completing a second master’s degree. I have a Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alabama. Still, I felt it was important that I understand the principles of designing a positive pedagogy for students, so I’m now working toward a Master of Instructional Design. It’s a new program here at UNA, and I hope to graduate next December if I can keep up the pace.<br><br></div><div>I’m really excited that this degree plays into helping people develop courses around open education products. So, when I tell faculty, “Hey, let’s move your courses from traditional high-cost textbooks to OER,” I can actually help them do that.<br><br></div><div>Open is my guiding principle, and I love this work.<br><br></div><div><br></div><div>Our sincere thanks, Jennifer, for today’s conversation. We share your excitement for more good things to come.<br><br></div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/382021-10-24T12:00:00Z2022-04-06T15:09:20ZSeptember Office Hours: Developing OER for Language Programs<div><em>Watch the </em><a href="https://youtu.be/4nWkH-ApoW8"><em>video recording</em></a><em> of this Office Hours 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.</em></div><div><strong>Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please </strong><a href="mailto:joh20849@umn.edu"><strong>contact Tonia</strong></a><strong>.</strong></div><h2>Audio Transcript</h2><div><strong>Office Hours: Developing OER for Language Programs </strong></div><div><strong>Speakers:</strong></div><ul><li>Apurva Ashok (Director of Open Education, The Rebus Foundation)</li><li>Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)</li><li>Sadam Issa (Assistant Professor of Arabic, Michigan State University)</li><li>Sarah Sweeney (Project Coordinator, Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL))</li><li>Carl Blyth (Director, COERLL) – Carl was scheduled to speak but was absent.</li><li>Christian Hilchey ( Senior Lecturer, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin)</li><li>Regina Gong (Open Educational Resources (OER) & Student Success Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries)</li></ul><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Welcome everybody, welcome to another Office Hours session. My name is Apurva Ashok, I am the Director of Open Education at the Rebus Community, and I’m joining you all today from Toronto and from the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the First Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I am very grateful to be living here and working here and to join you remotely and start a conversation about OER and language programs. </div><div>I’m going to pass it over to Karen, who is from the Open Education Network and who has been a wonderful collaborator these past four years or so that we’ve been running Office Hours events. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Apurva. And I am very happy to be joining all of you here today. I am coming to you from San Luis Obispo, California, the traditional land of the Chumash people. And today we’re going to be talking about OER for language programs. We are joined by three guests. Unfortunately Carl Blyth, who was expected to join us from COERLL, is unable to make it today. But luckily, we still have a couple of people from the program who can talk about their experience. </div><div>So the Open Education Network is a community of professionals working to make higher education more open. And one of the ways we do that is by partnering with the Rebus Community, as Apurva said, for almost four years on these monthly Office Hours. If this is your first Office Hours session, just to orient you to what to expect in the coming hour, we will hear introductions very briefly about five minutes or so from our guests. </div><div>And during that time we invite you to think of questions and comments in the chat, because after the introductions we’ll turn things over to you to really drive the conversation. And hopefully help you learn what you need for what you’re interested in or what you’re trying to do on your campus. So, without further ado, I would like to introduce our guests.</div><div>Today, we are joined by Sadam Issa, Assistant Professor of Arabic at Michigan State University; Sarah Sweeney, Project Coordinator at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning, otherwise known as COERLL; and Christian Hilchey, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. And today, we’re talking about OER for language programs. And Sarah is going to kick us off. </div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Thank you and thank you for having us today. So as Karen said, I am Sarah Sweeney, I’m Project Coordinator at COERLL. So COERLL is based at UT Austin, so I’m coming to you from Austin today. But we’re funded by a federal grant, a Title VI grant that is meant to increase the capacity of foreign language learning in the United States. So we do a lot of work with people in Texas, but we also work with people all over the country with teachers, faculty and students to develop OER. </div><div>So we’ve developed full curricula textbooks, PD modules, lesson plans and videos and all sorts of other things. And we also do professional development, and I wanted to, while I mention that I’m going to put two links in the chat before I forget. So we have some office hours of our own coming up, which are different than these office hours. They’re just for dropping in and asking questions. </div><div>And then, we also have a course about OER specifically for language educators. And then we also do workshops for teachers about OER and also about language teaching. And I guess so, a little bit about COERLL we started as a different center maybe about 15 years ago. But we’ve been an official language resource center for 11 years now. And when we first started out, we developed a lot of bigger projects that were really heavily developed in the backend. </div><div>So we had web developers creating platforms for the content. But as we’ve gone on, we’ve progressed to making more resources that are more smaller scale or using tools that already exist and advising people. So they won’t need as much professional help developing their resources, but they can do it themselves. And of course, that’s because that makes the resources more adaptable, and it allows us I think also to work on more projects with people because we’re putting the tools in the hands of the people. </div><div>So we’ve been using H5P a lot more recently and Google Docs, but we also use WordPress a lot. And of course that adaptability is also perfect for language learning because languages are always evolving and changing, so it’s really nice to be able to make edits whenever you need to. And we’ve also been focusing more on emphasizing to people the practices of open education not just the resources themselves. </div><div>So, starting off really developing resources, but now we’re really trying to emphasize the practices as well and build a little bit of a community. And I guess I’ll talk a little bit about the benefits of OER specifically for language learning, although I think that probably the other language faculty will probably do a better job of that and get into the specifics more. But we found that OER is so rich for language learning just because there’s so many opportunities to use authentic materials. </div><div>And go out on the internet and find all these different examples of language and culture being spoken by all sorts of different speakers. So that’s one really great benefit and you can also show a lot of linguistic variety with authentic resources. Whereas a lot of traditional language textbooks just have maybe one way of speaking, more traditional standardized language. </div><div>And then, also there’s so many different modalities for practicing, speaking, listening, reading and writing. So we use a lot of tools, or a lot of our project directors use a lot of different tools that aren’t necessarily open source actually but that are open access. So for example Hypothesis for social reading, or Voki or Quizlet, those can all be integrated into the OER as well. </div><div>And a lot of times we’ll do that by linking out to those resources from the resources on our site. And then, another thing too that we focus on because of our grant is less commonly taught languages. And that includes indigenous languages, as well, and so Christian will address the less commonly taught languages, because he’s in Czech. </div><div>But we’ve found that when people develop resources for less commonly taught languages, because they’re OER they get a lot more visibility because people want to learn those languages, but there aren’t as many resources. And also, a lot of less commonly taught languages maybe publishers aren’t as willing to publish new materials for them. So people often find that there’s old textbooks that are using old-fashioned approaches to language teaching. </div><div>So OER really offers an opportunity to get more visibility for less commonly taught languages and to update the pedagogy. So that’s basically all I was planning on saying, but I look forward to hearing everyone’s questions. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Sarah. Over to you, Sadam.</div><div><strong>Sadam:</strong> Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for inviting me to talk about our experience with OER at Michigan State University. As Apurva and Karen stated, I am an Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Department at Michigan State University, teaching Arabic. I would like to start talking about how the idea of developing an Arabic OER textbook started. I guess it started maybe 14 years ago without being really aware about it when I came to the States for the very first time as a Fulbright Scholar teaching Arabic at Beloit College in Wisconsin. </div><div>At that time, I was teaching Arabic and that was my very first exposure to teaching Arabic to non-native speakers of Arabic. At that time, I had the opportunity to also study foreign languages. So I studied French, and that’s where the comparison started. The comparison between the Arabic textbooks available at that time, with French textbooks. Obviously, Arabic is totally different from French or Spanish. </div><div>But with regards to certain areas we thought that we should tap on the French or Spanish textbooks, like organizing textbooks based on themes, which is lacking in the Arabic textbooks. Obviously, a year after I also started to study Spanish at the University of Wisconsin Madison, when I joined the university as a PhD student. I was also teaching Arabic as a teaching assistant. </div><div>And that’s where, as I said, the idea of creating an Arabic textbook that in principle mimics the structure of the French and Spanish textbooks. I was maybe a little bit exaggerating to say that I was able to study Spanish and French by my own, without the help of the teacher. Because the textbooks are so wonderfully structured, thematically based, lots of authentic videos, lots of pictures. It was communicative. </div><div>And they were actually based on ACTFL guidelines, which is in my opinion and my colleagues in the Arabic program who co-authored the Arabic OER textbook with me agree on that the current Arabic textbooks first of all, they don’t have themes, and they are not based on ACTFL guidelines. And that’s one of the driving forces for us to start this project, to fill this huge gap. </div><div>Notably also, about 75% of the students who study Arabic in first year drop Arabic by the end of second year. And part of it based on our conversation with the students is the difficulty of the language. Yes, Arabic obviously is one of the most challenging languages. But I believe that there are other techniques that could help students to have better proficiency in Arabic. </div><div>One of them in my opinion is design the Arabic textbooks based on themes as well as the activities that are included in the textbooks are aligned with ACTFL guidelines and can do statements. Although the current Arabic textbooks, or the most popular textbook that we’re using is very popular and it’s almost used in every university in the States called Al-Kitaab, which means the book. </div><div>But it is not based on ACTFL guidelines. Believe it or not, after six weeks, we spent the first six weeks teaching students the alphabet. Which is understandable, but after six weeks the very first word that students learn is the United Nations. Literally, you may laugh, smile, but this is totally fine. And this is a reality. The very first word the students learn after they finish with the alphabet is the United Nations. </div><div>Whereas in Spanish for example, we learn words related talking about yourself, study, then about shopping, fruits, vegetables, colors. Colors in the current Arabic textbook are introduced in third semester Arabic. So now, in my opinion, this encouraging for students to continue studying Arabic. Because obviously the easiest part to talk about is ourselves, our surroundings, food, colors, clothes, and so on and so forth. </div><div>So in the Arabic program, that was the first driving force. Then in 2016, we had the chance to create hybrid classes. So we teach Arabic every single day, five days a week. So we emptied Friday to be totally online. And we created a communicative lesson for our students, either to prepare students to the classes on Mondays, or to recycle the concepts that they have learned like during that week. </div><div>And that’s also sort of prepare us to our OER textbook. Then, we sat in one of our Arabic program meetings and we said, “Okay, let’s do something different.” And the idea to create a textbook obviously is a very laborious process. It requires really lots of money and lots of resources. And the easiest part was to create an open resource. And that’s where we officially started our project. </div><div>But also, we had also to get some other funding to host experts in the field to do a pedagogy and a workshop on that. And actually, we invited Christian Hilchey to participate in that pedagogy, but unfortunately that pedagogy workshop has been cancelled due to COVID. So, but we are still thinking of holding it, since we still have the funding. </div><div>So we have been introduced the OER at the library at MSU and Regina Gong who is here helped us tremendously to really create that open resource for our students that primarily designed communicative activities and tasked based activities based on ACTFL guidelines and can do statements. And also, create textbooks that are thematically based. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Sadam, I am sorry to interrupt, but thank you so much for the introduction to that book. I want to hand things over to Christian and then we’ll definitely get back to hearing more about your project. </div><div><strong>Christian:</strong> Hi everybody, thank you also for having me here today. I’m really glad to speak with you. So, I’m going to be telling you a little bit today about my project, Reality Czech. I am sending Reality Czech to you now, the link in the chat if you want to take a look at it. I do really well with some media in the background. So I’ve actually selected some slides to share with you today. </div><div>Reality Czech when it got started, I really did not plan on it being this huge project that it ended up being. But it really just kind of naturally snowballed. A lot of that had to do with how I began to understand the affordances of open and really what open will allow us to do in terms of integrating all sorts of media into our lessons and our classrooms. So here you can just see some of the data about the textbook itself. </div><div>And something that Sarah mentioned when she was talking about it, the idea with the textbook is that it be as open as possible and really capture the essence of those five Rs that we really want anybody who uses it to be able to remix and reuse the content, retain it in any way that they see fit. So you can for example take any of that content and open it and create a copy in your own Google drive or download a PDF or a Word document of any of the lessons. </div><div>The actual title, Reality Czech, was something that I developed because I was looking at the kind of content I was planning which was originally these sets of interview questions. This is all based on ACTFL guidelines. The real problem with so many of the Czech textbooks out there was that we had so much of a focus on grammar and so little focus on actual communication. </div><div>And so I wanted something that would get the students talking constantly. Grammar would be the tool that helped them talk, not the reason that we were studying the language. We weren’t studying the language so that we could learn different grammatical forms and grammatical phenomena. And so, I call it Reality Czech specifically because it was based on these reality style videos. </div><div>There are over 240 of them that I created for the textbook. And they all are focused around these questions. Here’s one for example what do you do when your head hurts? I won’t actually bother playing the video for you all, sorry, when you have a headache, that was a direct translation of the English when you head hurts or of the Czech rather. So, the speakers in this will answer usually I have a drink of water or usually I take a pain pill or something like that. </div><div>And so this notion of then getting my students to listen to other speakers talking about this, and then getting them to also share their own lives and their own experiences. So it gets them to understand Czechs and Czech culture. It also gets them to share this kind of information with each other, make comparisons, and so this is really all directly influenced by ACTFL guidelines. </div><div>And really what we need to be doing in our classrooms, making those sorts of comparisons. So let me skip past that. It’s a flipped classroom, a blended classroom, and so my students really learn most of what they need to know before they even walk into class through these various pre-class lessons. In class then we take lots of time to just practice the language, whether it’s playing little games to learn vocabulary or asking questions about what they like to do on vacation or various things like that. </div><div>And then, post-class gets them to write, gets them to really express themselves a lot using what they learned and what they practiced in class. So we really build every day, and it’s sort of this wash, rinse, repeat every day and really trying to build those skills. I like to use as you’ve seen through these slides a lot of images, and that’s what I sort of alluded to at the beginning, the affordances of open. </div><div>The more images, there are just people out there sharing all this great content with us. And why not utilize it? And what I realized is there’s almost if you can imagine it, there probably is a free image out there for you. I just wanted to give what I would call an extreme example, I wanted to give my students the language, I wanted them to be able to talk about what the weather was like yesterday. </div><div>And so, that they could talk about for example it rained yesterday so I stayed inside. Or it was sunny yesterday, so we went on a trip. And so here you can see just an example of an image that’s evocative, that puts the students into the mood to learn about this topic, weather in the past, what was it like. Or what do you usually wear, mining the Flickr account of one user who posted a lot of pictures of themselves and put them all under an open license. </div><div>I’m able to give an example of what this person usually wears. So, there’s a lot out there that we can use and also I discovered vlogs. And really, there are all these vlogs that are available for our students to be able to take advantage of. And because they’re open, I can retain them, I can modify them, and I can do all of the things that we love about OER. And so, really, this whole process of creating a textbook changed my pedagogy and changed the way I started to think. </div><div>And I started to think differently about how we create materials. I started to really think open. What does that mean? And for me, my curriculum, how I planned it in the beginning which was I have this idea for Czech and this is what it’s going to look like. I made this whole elaborate plan for Czech. We need to have this in unit one, this in unit two. A lot of it was very much based on grammatical phenomena. </div><div>We need to have this and then sequence it in this way, and the like. But that really changed because what we end up doing is we impose a lot of our own baggage onto what we believe should be taught in a language course. What we have maybe for example experienced in other textbooks that we’ve taught out of. But I like to take this metaphor of a farmers’ market because there’s so much great content out there that we can adapt and use for our own uses. </div><div>When I go to a farmers’ market, I can’t necessarily predict there are going to be tomatoes there. Here’s an example where you don’t see a single tomato in sight, but you do see some really great produce. And when I got to a farmers’ market, something I really love to do, I take a look around, what looks good today. And so, for me, the idea of designing an open curriculum was about seeing what’s out there. What can I build on? </div><div>How can I build on the successes of others? Their great material that they’ve shared with all of us and so that’s been my journey in a very quick nutshell. What it has meant for me to create open materials it was this very transformative experience. It very much transformed the way that I think about pedagogy and how I can offer the best learning environment for my students. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> I like the metaphor you carried through. I’ll just mention as Karen has indicated in the chat. This is really the time where we turn it to all of you to continue the lovely conversation that all three of our guests started. So if you have questions or comments or thoughts or if you’re working on language OER projects of your own and would love some advice about where to source images or videos or vlogs or all of the rest, or create those interactive activities that I’ve seen in Sadam’s book, please do go ahead and begin asking. </div><div>While maybe folks are thinking of a question, I might pose one to the three guests to kick off the conversation. I noticed in Sadam’s book, which I was browsing while he was speaking earlier and Christian with yours as well, there are just numerous non-textual elements that go into making a language book more engaging, dynamic and essentially useful for students. </div><div>Where do you start off with the planning or the sourcing around these elements? And Caitlin is asking in the chat what interactive elements or activities have your students been most excited about or engaged by? Feel free to jump in, any of you, and answer this question as it applies to your languages, to your contexts, to your books. </div><div><strong>Sadam:</strong> Can I start? Well, honestly, I think what excites the students most is they have particular themes. And the themes for each respective level is suitable to that level. So first year, etc, they have really related. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Sadam, we lost you briefly. You were mentioning but first year?</div><div><strong>Sadam:</strong> Yes, so for first year for example, students have topics related to things that they would like to talk about, unlike the other textbook. And the vocabulary that we integrated in these themes are practical. So they can talk about themselves, they can talk about their surroundings, they can talk about colors. And not wait a year and half until for example to be introduced to colors. Second, it’s interactive, so the students can really communicate with the textbook independently. </div><div>Okay, their free time and their self-check, obviously. There is also circulation of the vocabulary, so any grammar section, you’ll find let’s say activities where have sentences that circulate the vocabulary. Also, readings, okay as well as culture. Third, I thought that also my students really get excited about the images that we have. The authentic videos that we uploaded there. Something sort of missing in the current Arabic textbook. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thanks, Sadam. And Christian, it looks like you also had more to add. </div><div><strong>Christian:</strong> Yeah, I was just going to say there were two questions there, right? What most excites our students as well as how do we go about this process? So, I’ll start with that second question, what do I do to start off and how do I go about that process? And it directly goes back to what I ended with in my presentation because I’ve tried for example a lot of times when I have an example sentence or many example sentences to demonstrate some sort of new phenomenon, new vocabulary or whatever. </div><div>I start it sometimes with the sentence, and then try to illustrate it, and that wasn’t always that fruitful. And so a lot of times actually I would go on an image search. And start just playing around, seeing what’s out there. And then, I would find images that would inspire me. So letting yourself get inspired by what’s out there I think is really a fruitful way of going about things. </div><div>In fact, actually, when I’ve had to do it the opposite way, it ends up being very stressful. And so, I really like that building on the content that’s already out there. As for looking for images, there’s a lot of open image repositories that I utilize. My favorite places to go are either Wikimedia Commons or Flickr. Flickr is really actually fantastic, even if you can’t necessarily find through a search exactly what you’re looking for. </div><div>I’ll give you an example right now, I’m also working on the images for a Croatian textbook. And sometimes I can’t exactly find the precise place that I need, but I can sometimes find somebody’s album from a trip. And I can just leaf through and I can find they didn’t label it, but I can find their image, so I can find some theater or I can find some café downtown or something like that. </div><div>But so, I look at those resources. There’s also a lot of public domain resources that are available. So you have things like www.openclipart.org, you have sites that offer open images that are under similar open licenses but not quite public domain like Pixabay or Pexels and things like that. These are all images that are free for us to use. And so, the second question that you asked was what excites my students the most? </div><div>I think what they really enjoy is that we don’t have any in class instruction. We just practice the language the whole time. That means we’re playing games, we’re doing group work, we’re doing pair work, we’re doing presentations. It feels authentic. And I think that authenticity that bringing both real whether it’s videos, vlogs that I find or some of these interview videos that I created, that really makes the language feel living. </div><div>Versus when I used an older textbook that was black and white, very few images, walls of text, things like that. It was hard to really feel connected to the text, the language and what we were doing. So I know that’s a more vague answer.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. Amy had a question in the chat, there was great conversation going on in the chat. Amy would like to hear from all of you about the work and considerations you make in making the resources fully accessible. She has a few projects going and some interesting questions are coming up. Feel free to unmute, Amy, if you want to talk about some of those questions. Here they are. I should just read the next sentence. </div><div>For example, with languages that use different alphabets and characters from English, Arabic, Japanese or alt text for images that don’t defeat the learning goals, etc. Thoughts on accessibility. </div><div><strong>Christian:</strong> I can say that the alt text is the next step for Reality Czech, we’re not quite there yet. But it’s certainly necessary and something that we should all strive towards doing. I put all the alt text in English because I think the purpose of my images are so that they can see something that can correspond to the Czech text. If you’re visually impaired, you want to be able to see a description of what that is that you can understand fully, so that you can see how it connects to the Czech text. </div><div>For me to put alt text into Czech, I don’t know if that would serve the purposes necessarily of alt text. So I haven’t had to worry about that at all. But I could see some reasons to put alt text in the target language, I just haven’t run across that yet for my own project. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Sarah, how do you handle that at COERLL?</div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Well, we’re a little bit in the same boat. We’ve just started really addressing all these accessibility things. So, it really depends for our resources. Some of our resources have video transcripts and some don’t. But now we’re trying to make sure all of them do. And I think most of our projects do not have alt tags yet, so we’ve been starting to talk to project directors about starting to add them. </div><div>So that’s something we’re pretty behind on, but I agree with what Christian was saying about putting it in English so it’s easy to read for students. I’ve also been thinking that well, we haven’t tried this yet, but I was thinking that could be a fun open pedagogy project for students, because I know I’ve gone to accessibility workshops where they have you come up with fun alt texts for images. </div><div>So I don’t know, maybe the students could work on the textbook and add their own alt text or something like that. Because it’s a big job sometimes if there’s so many images, then it would be nice to I think get a lot of people involved in that task. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> And Regina has been saying in the chat that the second year OER that Sadam and Iman have been working on is undergoing an accessibility check. Sadam, Regina, did either of you want to describe what the process has been for the first year book released already?</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Regina, you’re muted. </div><div><strong>Regina:</strong> Yeah, I am muted. So the book that’s now available at the MSU publishing page is actually the first year, second semester OER. So right now, what I just put in the chat is that the first year, first semester book, right Sadam, that’s beginner Arabic is already finished. We’ve done the copyediting and Sadam and Iman are teaching with that OER in the classes for Fall. </div><div>But we’re not yet ready to release it to the whole world, because we’re still doing the full accessibility check. And like what I said in the chat, I give that first semester to the faculty to teach with the OER, refine and incorporate the feedback from the students so that they can make the necessary changes. Typically, I release it as soon as the semester is over or beginning January. So that we offer a resource that is robust, high quality for the other faculty to adapt and revise as they see fit. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Yeah, that’s a wonderful plan and I especially appreciate the time you’ve taken to really make sure that you’re getting the student feedback because with a lot of language OER in particular, you want to make sure that it’s meeting those goals that you’ve set out. I am seeing another question in the chat from May who teaches classical Chinese. She’s wondering and maybe this is for Christian, where do you find those vlogs? What’s the search process like?</div><div><strong>Christian:</strong> So the discovery of vlogs, it happened one really late evening, I was still trying to figure out what Reality Czech was going to be. And I’ll just admit it, it was a little bit rudderless at that point. And I started going online and I knew that for example YouTube and Vimeo allow you to put an open license on your content. But my searching up to that point hadn’t yielded a whole lot of great content. </div><div>And then, I realized that there were several international words that users all around the world apply to their videos. These international words, I did a little bit of looking around, they’re in English, but you might have somebody who does videos in French or Spanish or German or Czech or Russian, even scripts that don’t use the Latin alphabet and they’ll still put in their title something like vlog. </div><div>So I started actually googling vlog and I would actually, sorry, not Google, but actually going into YouTube and vlog and then just any other word out there that I was curious about. So, for example vlog Christmas or vlog vacation. And that led me to start to discover not only really good content, but really good creators of content. </div><div>So I would go into their channel and realize not only do they have a few videos that are titled vlog, but they have a couple of dozen other videos that have other titles and they’re also under a Creative Commons license. And so, this allowed me to really quickly get way more content than I could ever, ever handle. And so, I mentioned some of these international words, so another one is Time Lapse. </div><div>So this is something that for example I’ve been using in my first year Czech class over the last couple of weeks. They have just been introduced to a good number of vocabulary words, and we’re starting to learn the plural. So what happens if I see a time lapse of a city? What are the things that I see? Well, I see cars, I see buildings, I see trees, I see buses, I see trams, I see all of these different things that suddenly I can get the students to watch this time lapse video. </div><div>Drone videos work the same way. I can get them to then describe just what are the things that you see? List them all out. Additional ones were for example Hall, Hall is actually an international word and if you’re not familiar with what a Hall is, it’s where somebody maybe buys a lot of different clothing items. And then, they try them all on and there are a lot of Hall videos that are open.</div><div>Additionally there’s Unboxing, that’s a commonly used international word. I haven’t had a lot of success with Unboxing, or rather I haven’t really tried very hard to put an Unboxing video into my language classroom. I’m forgetting some, I’m sure, but that basically gets at it. Actually, I have them listed right here. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Christian, maybe as you think of them, please drop them in the chat, it’s so fun to hear about them and think about all the ways the internet can be leveraged for language learning, like an Unboxing video. It’s really fun to imagine. So the next question is from Liz and I think we talked a little bit about this in the chat as well. But maybe specifically for Sadam and Christian, but also generally for Sarah, are textbooks written for one year or multiple year studies?</div><div>Is there a traditional way it’s done in language learning? Is that changing? I think many of us can think back on our time spent learning a language and often there would be maybe one book for one year, is that still the case? How is it working?</div><div><strong>Christian</strong>: I’m happy to start on that one. Right now, Reality Czech is primarily a first year textbook. However, the way that I’m developing now is I’m developing additional chapters that one could not conceivably cover in the first year. And so the idea is everybody has a different setup. For example, I was teaching five days a week and I know other universities might have a Czech class that’s three days a week. </div><div>And so, for me to create a book that’s necessarily going to be called first year, well it really just depends on how much you meet and how much you can cover in that year. Right now, I for example cover eight chapters in the first year. I used to cover 10 but I found that pace a little bit too fast. So we have 10 chapters that are developed right now, that were the first year curriculum, but now I’m actually pushing two of those chapters into the second year and developing two more chapters. </div><div>So at this point, I’m quite a good ways towards what will eventually be something that could be used in the second year curriculum and beyond. I don’t know what it means to be a second year book anymore. I know what it means to help my students gain more and more proficiency. But as if there’s some sort of artificial cut off that this is what makes first year and this is what makes second year, I don’t know if I truly understand what that is anymore. </div><div>So that’s where we are, I’m just continuing the development process and basically stacking more on top of it. And so, yeah. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Yeah, thank you. Sarah, is there anything in the COERLL catalog that sort of typical starting point or trends? </div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> I would say most of the resources are for first year, but then we hear from people using our resources all over the country who are using them in all different ways, like spread across two years or condensed into one semester even. So it seems like people are really using them all different ways. I think some people are developing more modular things now, too, which might not work as well for beginning language courses. </div><div>But for intermediate language courses where the students already have a foundation, can make different modules and different topics or something and can mix and match. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Super. Sadam, feel free to respond to that, I know we’ve talked about your different books for first and second year. There’s also a new question in the chat. And we’ll start with you. How long did it take you to develop your textbook? How many people collaborated with you? You have a co-author and I note Regina supported your work, so maybe you could talk about that support as well as any stipends and release time to develop your textbook. </div><div><strong>Sadam:</strong> Well, thank you. That’s a good question. The short answer is when we start really writing the actual textbook, probably a year and a half, two years for first year. But the idea also started when we were doing our hybrid classes, starting in 2016. So we used some of the materials that we use for the hybrid classes. And obviously developed them and refined them for the Arabic textbook. </div><div>It’s a very laborious process, it’s me and my colleague in the Arabic program, we used to spend tens of hours of work per week until we were done with the first semester Arabic textbook and second semester textbook, which is for the whole first year. We’re thinking of doing it for the second year. But we haven’t really practically started. We really want to see how the first book or the first year OER textbook works for the students. </div><div>And see the results, actual results, since we are implementing and piloting it with our first year students. And obviously we can gauge that through different ways, obviously observation because we are teaching that course. Maybe ask students formally and informally to provide their feedback. </div><div>But a more reliable scientific way is to really conduct some OPIs with the students towards the end of each semester and see whether the students really score the appropriate language proficiency level at that particular point of the semester. And then, look at the data and results and obviously move forward or not. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Sadam. Regina, feel free to jump in if there’s anything you want to add about the program structure or support. I have a question for you, Sarah. You talked a little bit about how COERLL is shifting from the resources and focusing on the resources to moving towards practices and supporting open practices. Can you say a little bit more about that shift and what that looks like?</div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Yeah, well I would say that we’re still developing resources with people. And I don’t want to say that we’re developing the resources because the project teams are developing them and we’re supporting them. But I think so, although we’re still churning resources out, we’re just trying to have more projects that are a little bit more collaborative. Like for example, we have a community for teaching Spanish as a heritage language. </div><div>And so, there’s a community website on there where teachers can go and ask questions and share ideas with each other. And we collect resources there from all different places and they all have open licenses on them. And then, at our workshops we tell people about the licenses. So the main point of the workshop is to learn about teaching Spanish as a heritage language. </div><div>But then, people also learn a little bit about OER at the same time. So, yeah, that’s one example of how we’re just trying to build a community around OER and get people in touch with each other. They can share open ideas at the same time as learning about language teaching as well. And also, we’re trying to get students more involved in that slowly. So, that’s something I think we can work a lot more on. Yeah, so that’s one example. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thanks, Sarah. I’m wondering could you possibly maybe drop into the chat a link to the vast language collection that you have at COERLL? Because I’ve come across so many resources from your site that I’ve sent to other educators, instructors. I know Christian and Sadam have both shared their books as well. I also noticed this week that Pressbooks has put out a language learning collection in their directory. </div><div>I’ve just dropped in a link to that. One of the things that I’ve always found when I’m supporting language learning projects is to just scour the repositories and databases and the Open Textbook Library as well for other language OER, even if it’s not in the same language as the one that teams might be producing. It’s just so nice to get the inspiration from others. Like today with the vlogs from Christian and with all the H5P and just the methodological approach that Sadam was describing. </div><div>It looks like we have about eight minutes left. So I might just encourage folks in our audience if you have any burning or final questions, please do drop them in now. Speakers, if you have any questions for each other, please feel free to ask away. And Sarah, thank you, it’s nice to see that there’s also the badging incentive for folks to develop language OER and to submit and be featured on the COERLL site. </div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Well, I had a question for Sadam, first time to address this, so when you mentioned the OPIs I was wondering if you actually tested this out? Like if you tested your students’ proficiency levels when they were using old resources and compared that to when they are using your OER? Because I would be curious to see that research. </div><div><strong>Sadam:</strong> Yes, that’s actually the best way to do it, to really come up with the scientifically reliable data. I did not officially really think of your methodology, but I think I should do that. We were thinking of testing the students after they are done with this current semester, since we are already using it. Also, the second semester after the end of the Spring. But in the Arabic program, I am the one who is responsible for conducting the placement tests. </div><div>And part of the placement test is doing unofficial oral proficiency interview. And I know where the students are. And I have obviously the recordings of these placement tests, and I have the scores. I can compare obviously the scores, the old scores with my future scores and see if there is a difference. Yeah, that could also give us a better idea. I have the old ones, the old tests. Those who studied the old textbook. </div><div>Then, I will be having by the end of this semester in Spring, new tests and compare them with the old ones. But that’s a good way of looking at it, good solution, thank you, Sarah, appreciate it. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> So, as you may know from reading in the chat, I have a link in my clipboard that I was letting Apurva know, since we’re starting to wrap up to please think about what you may want future Office Hour conversations to include. We do have a way for you to drive our future conversations and topics. And so, if you have a moment, please let us know in this quick and easy form. </div><div>Are there any other questions or comments that we may have missed in the chat? Regina has been providing some additional details about the support that they offer at Michigan State. Feel free to let us know if we missed anything before we thank our guests. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> I think we got all of the questions that are in the chat. But it looks like this conversation on OER and languages is not certainly the last. Regina mentions that at the upcoming Open Education Conference in October, she’ll be moderating a panel with Sadam and Iman supporting OER creation in the least commonly taught languages. So if you all can get a chance to attend there, I would highly recommend it. </div><div>And Sarah has also mentioned that COERLL is going to start doing office hours for language. So, if you’re a language educator, if you’re working on an OER language project, please feel free to drop into those sessions. And Sarah, can you remind us, anyone is welcome at those drop in webinars, is that right?</div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Yes, correct yeah, it’s specifically for languages, but anyone working on language projects. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Wonderful, I know that there are a few people in this room today who are working on OER projects, and I think we might want to continue the conversation at Office Hours ourselves. But that would be a great place to start. Thank you all, and I’ll just turn maybe to all three of you speakers. Any final words on your end before we officially wrap up for today? </div><div><strong>Christian:</strong> Other than just thank you for having me and thank you for letting me share some of my experiences. It was a joy to both talk to you and it was a joy over the last several years to build this project out. So, it’s a lot of work to do a project like this, but for me at least it was very rewarding. </div><div><strong>Sarah:</strong> Yeah, thank you and I hope we can all keep in touch about all the great work everyone’s doing. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> I think we’re echoing thanks all around. Karen, I’ll let you close us out for today, in that case. </div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Okay, thank you everyone for joining us at Office Hours. Thank you to our three guests, Sadam Issa, Sarah Sweeney and Christian Hilchey. It was a delight, and we look forward to seeing you again in the future. Take care. </div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Take care everybody, thank you.</div><div>END OF VIDEO</div><h2>Chat Transcript</h2><div>00:16:57 Sarah Sweeney: <a href="https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/events">https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/events</a><br><a href="https://utexas.instructure.com/courses/1097558">https://utexas.instructure.com/courses/1097558</a><br>00:21:29 Regina Gong: Here’s the link to the Elementary Arabic OER that Sadam and Ayman have written <a href="https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/elemarabicll/">https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/elemarabicll/</a>. Feel free to share with anyone on your campus. It’s truly one of a kind and I’m so proud to collaborate with our faculty on this project.<br>00:21:36 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Thanks, Regina!<br>00:25:34 Regina Gong: One thing that is unique with their OER like what Sadam has mentioned is that it conforms to the ACTFL standards/guidelines. <a href="https://www.actfl.org/">https://www.actfl.org</a><br>00:29:24 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thanks Sadam, I’m just emailing the link to your book to the Oregon grant team working on a beginning Arabic project!<br>00:29:24 Christian Hilchey: <a href="https://realityczech.org/">https://realityczech.org/</a><br>00:36:10 Karen Lauritsen: Your questions are welcome! Please feel free to start posting questions for any of our guests in the chat.<br>00:37:50 Karen Lauritsen: Here are COERLL publications that are in the Open Textbook Library: <a href="https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks?term=coerll&commit=Go">https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks?term=coerll&commit=Go</a><br>00:37:50 Sadam Issa: Thank you Amy.<br>00:38:10 Amy Hofer (she/her): I’d love to hear the speakers talk about making their resources fully accessible. I have a few projects going with interesting questions coming up. For example with languages that use different alphabets/characters from English (Arabic, Japanese) or alt text for images that don’t defeat the learning goals, etc.<br>00:38:19 Caitlin Balgeman: What interactive elements or activities have your students been most excited about/engaged by?<br>00:39:38 Mei Kong: Christ. Where do you to find the Vlogs?<br>00:41:10 Liz Scarpelli, University of Cincinnati Press: Are the textbooks written for one year or multiple year study?<br>00:41:55 Sadam Issa: We finished first year and we are planning to move to second year here at MSU<br>00:42:20 Sarah Sweeney: Reality Czech is one year.<br>00:42:58 Amy Hofer (she/her): Here’s where I’m collecting links to open image repositories FYI <a href="https://faq.openoregon.org/pages/images">https://faq.openoregon.org/pages/images</a> (lots of ideas sourced from Heather Blicher’s list)<br>00:43:05 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Thanks Amy!<br>00:46:28 Regina Gong: Their 2nd year OER (Sadam and Ayman)—Beginner Arabic is done but not ready to release it yet to the world since we are still doing the full accessibility check. Also I allow one semester for our authors to teach with the newly created OER so that they can incorporate students’ feedback and so they can revise and improve more.<br>00:46:55 Regina Gong: Stay tuned. ?<br>00:49:16 Joshua Newman [he/him/his]: I think it’s important to note that at MSU, our OER grant program and development process is designed by Regina to include Accessibility considerations from day 1 of the development process.<br>00:49:58 Amy Hofer (she/her): Thank you for the replies!<br>00:50:17 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Excellent point, Joshua! Building in accessibility into your workflow from Day 1 can make all the difference.<br>00:52:55 Sandra Martins: Hull or hall?<br>00:53:02 Sarah Sweeney: haul I think<br>00:53:02 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Haul!<br>00:53:10 Sandra Martins: Tx!<br>00:54:00 Christian Hilchey: international words — vlog, timelapse, haul, unboxing, roomtour<br>00:54:52 Caryn Connelly: To Christian and Sadam: how long did it take you to develop your textbooks, how many people collaborated with you, did you get support (stipends and/or release time) to develop your OER textbook?<br>01:01:13 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): <a href="https://pressbooks.com/collection-language-learning/">https://pressbooks.com/collection-language-learning/</a><br>01:01:19 Sarah Sweeney: <a href="https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/materials">https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/materials</a><br>01:01:55 Sarah Sweeney: To anyone developing language oER, you can earn a badge from us and be featured on our website: <a href="https://community.coerll.utexas.edu/">https://community.coerll.utexas.edu/</a><br>01:02:57 Regina Gong: @Caryn the OER Award Program at MSU for which Sadam got a grant offered $4,000 for creation of OER<br>01:03:04 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey | she/her: Thank you for sharing all of these great resources!<br>01:03:28 Regina Gong: And another $4,000 for the Beginner Arabic Our that they’ve just finished<br>01:03:34 Regina Gong: *OER<br>01:03:55 Karen Lauritsen: I’ve got the google form on my clipboard so can drop that in<br>01:04:06 Donna: Thank you for sharing these great resources!<br>01:04:50 Karen Lauritsen: Future Office Hours: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaGr1NCvVnk1C6uKiwkfYWvJcK0QDfwJIZJJV-ckmGK19Wpg/viewform">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaGr1NCvVnk1C6uKiwkfYWvJcK0QDfwJIZJJV-ckmGK19Wpg/viewform</a><br>01:05:02 Regina Gong: If you are attending Open Ed conference next month, I’m moderating a panel <a href="https://opened21.sched.com/event/moT5/supporting-oer-creation-in-the-least-commonly-taught-languages">https://opened21.sched.com/event/moT5/supporting-oer-creation-in-the-least-commonly-taught-languages</a><br>01:05:08 Caryn Connelly: Thank you, Regina! And thank you, Sadam for your answers as well.<br>01:05:10 Regina Gong: Sadam and Ayman are there<br>01:05:28 Sadam Issa: Thank you<br>01:05:29 Sarah Sweeney: Reminder that COERLL has office hours for language OER coming up! <a href="https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/events">https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/events</a><br>01:06:01 Nancy Wood: Thank you!<br>01:06:26 Amy Hofer (she/her): Great topic, thank you to the speakers!<br>01:06:41 Ashley Morrison (she / her): Thank you all! This was great.<br>01:06:53 Jennifer Snyder: Thank you for the resources and ideas!<br>01:06:54 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Thank you all – such a pleasure to hear and learn from you!<br>01:06:59 Mei Kong: Thank you all!<br>01:07:08 Sandra Martins: Thank you all!<br>01:07:13 Edith Jaco: Thank you!</div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/392021-10-11T12:00:00Z2022-04-06T15:10:30ZCelebrating the 2021 Certificate in OER Librarianship Cohort<div>The Open Education Network (OEN) would like to acknowledge and celebrate the librarians who completed the 2021 <a href="https://open.umn.edu/otn/oercert/">Certificate in OER Librarianship</a>. In addition, a hearty thank you to our wonderful instructors: Will Cross, Cheryl Casey, Mandi Goodsett, Jeanne Hoover, Wayde Oshiro, Elaine Thornton, Lily Todorinova, and Michael Whitchurch.<br><br></div><div>Congratulations to the following people who successfully completed OEN’s Certificate in OER Librarianship:</div><ul><li>Kathy Anders from Texas A & M University</li><li>Jenifer Baldwin from Saint Joseph’s University</li><li>Renee Bedard from the Community College of Aurora</li><li>Amber Burtis from Southern Illinois University Carbondale</li><li>Angelique Carson from Howard University</li><li>Mina Chercourt from John Carroll University</li><li>Anastasia Chiu from New York University</li><li>Liz Cooper from the University of New Mexico</li><li>Denise Cote from the College of DuPage</li><li>Beth Daniel Lindsay from Wabash College</li><li>Megan Dempsey from Raritan Valley Community College</li><li>Cari Didion from Governors State University</li><li>Chelsea Dickson from Kennesaw State University</li><li>Rhonda Donaldson from Shepherd University</li><li>Theresa Dooley from Kennesaw State University</li><li>Margaret Drehobl from Southwestern College</li><li>Tyler Dunn from Fort Lewis College</li><li>Erin Durham from University of Maryland Baltimore County</li><li>Katie Edigar from Harry S. Truman College</li><li>Kathy Essmiller from Oklahoma State University</li><li>Emily Finch from Kansas State University</li><li>Brittany Fischer from the University of North Dakota</li><li>Holly Gabriel from the University of North Dakota</li><li>Catherine Galarza-Espino from Morton College</li><li>Marianne Giltrud from Prince George’s Community College</li><li>Jaime Goldman from Nova Southeastern University</li><li>Stephanie Hallam from Southeast Missouri State University</li><li>David Hurley from the University of New Mexico</li><li>DeeAnn Ivie from the University of Texas at San Antonio</li><li>Manisha Khetarpal from Maskwacis Cultural College</li><li>Rusty Kimball from Texas A & M University</li><li>Shannon Kipphut-Smith from Rice University</li><li>Alexander Kirby from Pennsylvania Highlands</li><li>Jasmine Kirby from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar</li><li>Sarah Kostelecky from the University of New Mexico</li><li>Emma Lanners from Dixie State University</li><li>Kristin Lansdown from University of Wisconsin – Madison</li><li>Sarah LeMire from Texas A & M University</li><li>Randi Madisen from Century College</li><li>Travis Mann from the University of Wisconsin – Superior</li><li>Julie Meyer from Southeastern Community College</li><li>Katie Miller from Aiken Technical College</li><li>Jessica Moore from the University of Northwestern – St. Paul</li><li>Lily Morgan from Governors State University</li><li>Ashley Morrison from the University of Texas at Austin</li><li>Christina Norton from Bradley University</li><li>Sarah Northam from Texas A & M University-Commerce</li><li>Christine Pawliuk from Colorado State University</li><li>DeeAnna Phares from Northern Illinois University</li><li>Jeffrey Potter from Prince George’s Community College</li><li>Ann Raia from Oklahoma City Community College</li><li>Melody Rood from University of North Carolina at Greensboro</li><li>Tineka Scalzo from Wilbur Wright College</li><li>Andrea Schuler from Tufts University</li><li>Kristen Smith from Loras College</li><li>Rachel Stott from Auroria Library (University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Community College of Denver)</li><li>Holly Surbaugh from the University of New Mexico</li><li>Carol Traveny from Bryn Athyn College</li><li>Cory Whipkey from Bethel University</li><li>Sue Wiegand from Saint Mary’s College</li><li>Nicole Williams from CUNY Bronx Community College</li></ul><div>We are thankful for your time, energy, and commitment both to this program and to moving forward open education on your campuses.<br><br></div><div>Cheers and best wishes!</div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/372021-09-10T12:00:00Z2022-01-14T18:40:46ZResearch Funded to Explore Impact of Culturally Relevant OER<div>The Open Education Network (OEN) congratulates the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE) on a recent grant award from the U.S. Department of Education. “Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL)” is the grant-winning, collaborative proposal of Framingham State University, Fitchburg State University, Holyoke Community College, Northern Essex Community College, Salem State University, Springfield Technical Community College, and the Massachusetts DHE.<br><br></div><div>The $441,000 <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/programs/otp/index.html">Open Textbook Pilot Program</a> grant will fund important research being conducted by these OEN community members through 2024. The goal: to develop and assess the impact of remixing and creating culturally relevant open educational resources (OER) to improve student learning.<br><br></div><h2>Inclusive OER</h2><div>“It’s not only OER, but inclusive, culturally relevant, intentional, accessible OER,” notes Millie González, Project Lead and Interim Dean of Whittemore Library at Framingham State University. “It’s the type of OER that prioritizes, for example, faculty-of-color authorship and key things to make the textbook culturally relevant. What we’re trying to figure out and prove is, will it make an impact on student learning to have this new type of OER, particularly within underserved communities?”<br><br></div><h2>“Getting equity into the curriculum”</h2><div>Co-Project Lead, Instructor, and Instructional Designer Jessica Egan already takes a proactive, intentional approach to choosing learning materials for her composition students at Holyoke Community College. <br><br></div><div>Using research data and equity rubrics, Egan diversifies her courses’ featured authors, topics and selections based on student demographics. Enabling her students to “see themselves” within the content has yielded positive learning outcomes – results that she and the team believe correlate directly with inclusive, culturally relevant OER. <br><br></div><div>“All of these cultures in one conversation [bring] a much deeper learning experience,” says Egan, “where students can learn from one another, not only connecting their own culture and their own lived experiences, but also being a speaker to their own culture. To me, getting equity into the curriculum is the most important part right now.”<br><br></div><h2>Filling the gap</h2><div>The team itself is a bit of a remix, composed of people from diverse institutions with a variety of skills, many of whom will be working in new roles. Still, Co-Project Lead Robert Awkward of the Massachusetts DHE is quick to observe a strong, shared characteristic.<br><br></div><div>“Probably, what drew all of us together was the clear recognition that we have [OER] gaps,” Awkward says. “There are places, literatures, and disciplines where we simply have a lack of OER material, and the only way you’re going to get it is to somehow provide incentives for faculty members to create that material in those spaces.”<br><br></div><div>He adds that to date, most Massachusetts DHE efforts have focused on promoting faculty adoption of existing OER. This grant allows the state – for the first time – to offer stipends to faculty for adapting existing OER and/or creating new open textbooks that are culturally relevant to students being served.<br><br></div><h2>Long-term sustainability</h2><div>Participating faculty who are adapting or creating new OER may choose from two training options: a comprehensive, year-long mentoring program led by the Rebus Community, or access to an á la carte OER informational toolkit developed by the consortium. González said the team anticipates mentoring faculty to create or remix at least 24 textbooks per year for an impressive total of roughly 72 or more inclusive OER by the end of the grant term.<br><br></div><div>To track the impact of this inclusive OER, the team will measure drop, fail, and withdraw rates; grade performance; student satisfaction; and additional key performance indicators. The final assessment phase kicks in once faculty have taught using the remixed OER for at least two semesters and shared resulting data with the research team. <br><br></div><div>The project has been structured for scalability, longevity, and expansion. “This is seed money for us,” said Awkward of the 2021 grant. “Part of what I want to do from the state side with this assessment data, is to use it to really help us try to significantly increase state funding for OER so we can sustain this work.” <br><br></div><h2>Say yes, and other advice</h2><div>Based on the team’s grant proposal and project planning thus far, González, Awkward, and Egan offer the following road-tested, practical advice for open education advocates interested in pursuing grant opportunities:<br><br></div><ol><li>Put together a stellar team.</li><li>Work tenaciously.</li><li>Pay close attention to grant writing guidelines.</li><li>Build in enough time to complete the application properly.</li><li>Diversify your stakeholders.</li><li>Take the risk!</li></ol><div>“A lot of times I hear, ‘I just don’t have the expertise,’ ‘I don’t have the time,’ ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I checked all three of those boxes!” González recalls in good humor. “But we’re so passionate about the impact of accessible, culturally relevant OER, we took that risk. I think it’s the very first step – you have to say ‘yes,’ and then things will happen.”<br><br></div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/362021-09-03T12:00:00Z2022-01-24T17:25:22ZAugust Office Hours: Managing Inter-Institutional Authoring Teams<div><em>Watch the </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQ3-O7694c"><em>video recording</em></a><em> of this Office Hours 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.</em></div><div><br></div><div><strong>Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please </strong><a href="mailto:joh20849@umn.edu"><strong>contact Tonia.</strong></a></div><div><strong>Office Hours: Managing Inter-Institutional Authoring Teams</strong></div><h2>Audio Transcript:</h2><div><strong>Speakers:</strong></div><ul><li>Apurva Ashok (Director of Open Education, The Rebus Foundation)</li><li>Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)</li><li>Donna Westfall-Rudd (Associate Professor, Agricultural, Leadership, and Community, Virginia Tech)</li><li>Mary Leigh Wolfe (Professor, Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech)</li><li>Matthew DeCarlo (Assistant Professor of Social Work, La Salle University)</li><li>Jonathan Lashley (Associate Chief Academic Officer, Idaho State Board of Education)</li></ul><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Hello everybody, welcome to another Office Hours. I think it might be our last Office Hours this summer in the northern hemisphere, that is at least. I hope everyone is doing well. I’m Apurva Ashok, I am the Director for Open Education at the Rebus Community. And as always, I’m very excited to be co-hosting another Office Hours session with our lovely partners, the Open Education Network. Karen, I’ll pass it over to you to just introduce yourself and the OEN briefly.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Apurva. As always, it’s great to be here with you. My name is Karen Lauritsen, I’m publishing director with the Open Education Network, and we are a community of professionals working to make higher education more open. We are really glad that you’ve joined us today for a conversation about working with groups of authors across institutions, which is a really big undertaking.</div><div>And I know my co-host has some experience and expertise to share in that area as well. Apurva, do you want me to jump into introductions?</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Go ahead.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Okay. So today we are joined by Donna Westfall-Rudd, she is Associate Professor of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community at Virginia Tech. Mary Leigh Wolfe, who is Professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. Matthew DeCarlo, who is Assistant Professor of Social Work at La Salle University. And finally, Jonathan Lashley, who is Associate Chief Academic Officer with the Idaho State Board of Education.</div><div>So if you’re new to Office Hours, what’s going to happen is each of our four guests will spend just a handful of minutes talking about their experience working with authors from different institutions to create OER and open textbooks. And then, we will look to you, for your questions, your experience, this really is meant to be an Office Hours for you to talk about whatever is on your mind.</div><div>And as often happens, there is a lot of expertise in the room in addition to our four guests, so if you have stories you want to share during the hour, please don’t hesitate to chime in in the chat or unmute and let us know. So, I think I covered everything, and without further ado I’m going to hand things over to Mary Leigh.</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> Thank you very much, I’m really excited to have the opportunity to be here with this group and hear about what everybody is doing. The project that I want to spend a few minutes talking about is an open textbook that I’ve been involved with developing. It’s called Introduction to Biosystems Engineering. And this project to do this book came out of a previous project that was really focused on mobility of students across the Atlantic.</div><div>Colleagues in the US and in Europe were funded by the respective US and European Union. And most of that project was students studying abroad, but also we involved faculty in developing things, materials to help globalize our curriculum in biosystems engineering. And so, coming out of that, we wanted to pursue developing a textbook at the introductory level for first and second year university students.</div><div>Our design, the way we really wanted it to work was that we would have separate chapters about a variety of topics within our discipline, and that then an instructor could choose which topics were appropriate for their particular course or program. And we do have a lot of variety in the details of our programs around the world, so we wanted that kind of flexible thing.</div><div>So we got in, there were four of us, two faculty from my department here at Virginia Tech and then two colleagues at University College Dublin in Ireland. And we’re all members of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers or ASABE. And so, the four of us wrote a proposal to ASABE about seeking funding for supporting the development of this type of open, I wouldn’t know all the right language to use when we were developing it.</div><div>We didn’t really know we were developing an open educational resource, but we knew we wanted everybody to have it for free. But we didn’t really know all that, so we’ve learned a lot. And one of the people we actually learned a lot of this from is on the call here today, Anita Walz, from Virginia Tech publishing. So, she may add a few things later as well, and perhaps correct me as we go.</div><div>So, what we did, as I said, we went to ASABE, applied for funding, special project funds they have and they awarded them to us, so that was very nice. And then, as we were getting started with it, my colleague here at Virginia Tech, Jactone is his first name. Jactone said, “Oh we need to go talk to Anita.” Because he’d been talking to Anita about something else he was working on.</div><div>So we did, and the way it worked out then, Virginia Tech publishing and ASABE reached agreement very amiably about producing this and publishing together, so that was really exciting. So then, with regard to the authors, etc the way we set it up, as I said, there were the four of us that I think we called ourselves the coordinating group all along. And then, what we did, the original set of chapters covered six different technical communities within ASABE.</div><div>So we recruited section editors for each of those six, so two people for each section, so there were 12 of them. And then, they were instrumental in helping to identify topics and authors across the different areas. And so that was our structure, we had the oversight group, section editors and then authors. We put together authors, guidelines for authors, guidelines for editors, and talking about outlining how it should be structured.</div><div>As I said at the beginning, this is focused on the audience being first and second year university students. And so, one of our biggest challenges working with authors was getting them to write at that level. Many people in academia when we write a chapter for a book, it’s like the state of the knowledge on that subject. And that’s not what we needed. And so, that was one of our biggest challenges in terms of that content with the authors.</div><div>Everybody was excited and wanted to do it, and that part was good. Another challenge that we had was that many of us and many of the authors weren’t so familiar about one particular thing took a lot of time with figures and diagrams, illustrations about licensing. And obviously, this was going to be a license CC BY, and we had to get that done. So, that was another challenge that we learned a lot now.</div><div>So I’ll stop by showing you, the book has been published. Thank you. We were posted online in January of 2021, and it’s set so that the individual chapters can each be downloaded by themselves. The compilation can be downloaded also for free. And then, a hard – it’s really soft bound, but hard print copy can be ordered through Amazon. In the US that’s just $35.</div><div>So, that’s where we are now, and I just have to brag on one thing, because we were kind of stunned. As of this morning, the book has been downloaded 23,002 times, so we’re like unbelievable. But I know I need to stop there, and I’ll be happy to say a little bit more later about how we’re going forward now. So, thank you.</div><div>Apurva: Thank you, Mary Leigh. I have so many questions, it sounds like a wonderful collaboration with two faculty based in the US and the other two in Ireland. So, I will invite folks, if you have questions please feel free to keep them coming for Mary Leigh in the chat. And congratulations, Mary Leigh, 23,000 and counting downloads, that is fantastic, for you and for the rest of the team.</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> And Anita has put all the links in there, thank you, Anita.</div><div><strong>Anita:</strong> Yeah, sure.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> And Donna, I’ll pass it over to you to tell us a little more about your team and your projects.</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> Yes, thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here and it really is a privilege to work at Virginia Teach where I also get to work with Anita. And Mary Leigh and I work in a similar space, so it’s just great to be here with my colleagues. And our project started from a different place, and it’s really fun to talk about how we have a different group working with our book. We are producing teaching in the university, learning from graduate students and early career faculty.</div><div>And this book came about from several years of conversations with graduate students in our College of Agriculture’s graduate teaching scholarship program. It was created in 2012, and our PhD students in our college are eligible to apply to this three-year program. And as we’ve conducted this cohort-based experience for our students, there was frequently conversation about what resources should we be using.</div><div>There’s lots of different teaching resources out and about, but they’re expensive. And if you look at all the different topics we try to address in our program, the pricing of those resources became a challenge for our students. And so, for a couple of years we said, “We should just write a book.” So finally, two years ago we decided why not? And so, the exciting piece for me in this is that there’s three editors.</div><div>I’m lead editor, my two other co-editors are Dr Courtney Vengrin and Dr Jeremy Elliott-Engel, who are my former students. And they were the TAs for the program itself. So we all have a lot of heart in the work we’re doing, and we have longstanding relationships. And then, we have 14 chapters that they’re now final, we are getting close to being almost done with editing in the next couple of months.</div><div>And with that, we have 17 authors, which is a little crazy. And also, we have seven vignettes that we’re inserting in our chapters, and I think that brings in another six authors to our group. So we have a group of people, one of the strengths of working in this group and having the standing common experience of the graduate teaching scholars program is we really didn’t have conflicts.</div><div>We’ve had a lot of common experiences within the group, and so anything that came up as something to talk about really we’ve had these long-term relationships. So we just had conversations and we came to consensus. So that was really wonderful. We are challenged by the fact that we are all young authors, where some of our authors are current finishing PhD students, and you can imagine their work right now.</div><div>And then they also are if not that, they’re very early career faculty somewhere in the US and they’ve all been teaching through COVID at the same time that they are trying to write these books. We lost a couple of authors, one person said that during the semester her modality in teaching expectations had changed four times. And so that had a real impact on her ability to write the book because she was constantly rewriting her class resources.</div><div>And so, we really understood that, so we did lose a couple of authors. So that is one of our challenges. We’re a tight group so that breaks our heart a little bit. So it might be scaring Anita, or I’m not sure how she feels about this, but we’re already talking about a second edition because we’re really using this not only as a resource for students to read and utilize in the program but learning about writing book chapters and using these types of resources is part integrated now into the program instruction.</div><div>And so I see us having another version in short time, especially because some of our students now have done a lot of work teaching online as graduate students and as early career faculty and they are very innovative in their teaching practices. So we already have several chapters, we know we need to add but nobody has time to do it right now. So we’re starting a list for the next edition.</div><div>And so, with that I don’t even want to say when we’re done, but I’m reading through things for a final time and we have to turn it over for editing on September 1 and we will have it sent, I promise, Anita. There was what we do.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thanks, Donna, and it sounds like Anita is game for a second edition or a volume or whatever you and your team is willing to put forward to her.</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> Well, she’s a rock star and we also want another excuse to work with her.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> That will be wonderful, I also especially love how with your team you have really brought students to the forefront, and recognized the expertise that they can hold, especially the graduate students and really thinking about ways to use this collaborative authorship opportunity to help them advance as well. So that’s really great to see. Jonathan, I think you’re going to take the mic over from Donna next, so I’ll pass it over to you.</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> Thanks, Apurva, thanks everyone. It’s nice to see all of you. Inter-institutional authoring has been a really important priority for all of our open education work in Idaho and this predates any of the work that I’ve been doing at the state level. Before this was formalized, we were just doing a lot of affinity-based work where we were trying to find counterparts at other institutions, who were interested in open ed and authoring projects.</div><div>And trying to figure out how we can consolidate resources and expertise and faculty interest and so on. But today I really want to highlight a program that we just completed the first cohort passing through a three-semester fellowship program at the state. And we’re now looking to start our second cohort this coming Fall. It’s a fellowship that we refer to as the OPAL program, and OPAL stands for openness, pedagogy, advocacy, and leadership.</div><div>And the genesis of it is that in 2019 the Idaho state legislature awarded $50,000 to our state board of education to pursue collaborative OER development. They had to meet specific requirements, so in Idaho we have common indexing framework for our general education courses. Meaning that there’s 43 courses that have been identified that if they’re taught at Boise State or College of Easter Idaho or LC State, they’re effectively equivalent.</div><div>They’re in the same outcomes, they have roughly comparable experiences for students. And so, they wanted OER to take root in those courses, which makes a lot of sense from an efficacy standpoint. I think many of us who have worked in this for a while we know that Gen Ed courses are great because they’re high impact, they’re high enrolment, they’re often required. But additionally, they wanted to see collaboration happen between institutions.</div><div>And so, this was one of the first tasks that I inherited when I came into my role back in 2019. And the question I asked, and I wasn’t turned away, we were given latitude to instead exploring how can we replace specific textbooks by identifying maybe those highest cost textbooks that exist in the state, instead it was a matter of how can we empower faculty and students to improve course material use in these specific courses.</div><div>And so, we had a call for proposals go out that was reviewed by our general education committee. We had far more applicants than I expected, and I think that’s one of the benefits of looking for collaborators across eight institutions is that the coalition of the willing then suddenly expands eightfold. And we ended up giving fellowships to 15 faculty from English, from world languages, and from math.</div><div>And the output has been everything from a more traditional e-text that’s 2,000 pages in length and it’s published, and it’s modular and based in Pressbooks that folks can use to openly licensing assignments and interactive modules. And importantly, the emphasis on pedagogy and on instructional practice and assessment and trying to scale that across institutions led faculty to think they might have all had preferred textbooks or resources that they were using in their specific courses, in their sections of say English 101 or 102.</div><div>But when all of a sudden you’re having conversations about assessment and about course schedule and about the experience and the assignments that you want your students to have at your specific institution. And then pluralizing that across multiple institutions, they found that they were really leading with that sort of backwards design mentality, focusing on what do we want the student experience to be.</div><div>And then, how can we find ways to support one another in reaching those assessment goals and those experience goals. And so, it’s been a really cool process. It’s gotten a lot of attention, actually from our state and I’m happy that we’re able to watch a second cohort, because it’s proven that it’s been sustainable because not only are those faculty still working on these projects, it was a three-semester commitment.</div><div>And these drafts are ongoing, but ultimately now they’re bringing in other faculty into the mix. And so, it’s like fellows by extension, I suppose. And with that, I’ll kick it over to Matt.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Matt, take it away.</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> Yeah, I’m a faculty member, sorry, I have a PowerPoint. Yeah, all right, it’s done, thanks. I’m really excited about this thing. It took three years, and it’s basically a labor of love. So it’s me and three of my friends from my PhD cohort, the team varied, but it was those four core people. And we created this textbook, it’s a 24-chapter textbook intended for graduate level research methods.</div><div>We saw it as a love letter to our doctoral institution, and that multi-paradigmatic research approach that they had. We’re really excited, we have 250 students who’ve already adopted it, despite the fact that it’s been in very, very slow final production over the last year. And yeah, we have an adaptation project coming, we have some doc students who are actually going to adapt it.</div><div>And we are going to go meet with them and be like, “Hey we were you guys, and we created this thing. Maybe you guys want to [inaudible 0:19:26].” So I think everybody here talked about some of the things that went well. I had some things that didn’t go so well. So our collaboration was we got a VIVA grant, which means that we were collaborating with other Virginia institutions.</div><div>And our major collaborator just basically their work continued, but in a very, very limited capacity. So, they didn’t ultimately end up adopting the resource, they didn’t end up producing as much of the resource as they had committed to doing originally. And while that sort of allowed us to sort of excise them from the final product, somebody still has to do that work now.</div><div>Whatever sort of stuff is not on the plate of one institution partner, the other institutional partner has to make that up. And it ended up taking another year of labor to actually get that stuff done. So some of the stuff that I learned out of that was obviously to plan for contingencies, even just blowing through our first deadlines and building in slack. Even our second set of deadlines we had to blow through just because this institutional partnership fell apart.</div><div>Some of the things that I really wish that I had done differently in addition to building in slack was hiring a project coordinator. So we are a very tight group of four co-authors, we could really rely on each other’s work. But also, I was the person on that authoring team who was doing a lot of the coordinating work. So I was doing the background stuff and the grants management and dealing with getting funds paid at a university.</div><div>It takes a really long time, and there needs to be somebody, who if you are able to can dedicate that stuff or if not, you need to dedicate that time. That resource does need to be dedicated in some way. So if you’re like me and you don’t have a project coordinator, if you don’t have a Jonathan at your campus or an Anita, you need somebody. That sort of stuff needs to come in.</div><div>But at the same time, we ended up finding a lot of new, I guess it’s inter-institutional partnerships. Sorry. Yeah, we had faculty transition so two authors moved to different institutions, so we have two new people or two new campuses who have adopted the book, coincidentally. Unfortunately, that process takes a year, no one who authored this book used it in the year after it was published because we weren’t allowed to.</div><div>But through peer review, through some marketing, which is what I’m calling my social media addiction, we were able to build enough people who are going to adopt the resource. And through getting a lot of those peer review comments, we got that first round of people who might adopt it. Some of the stuff that I’m really excited that I hope people start with are some of our appendices.</div><div>So we were really hoping that this textbook becomes a hub for just people across institutions. I think one of the challenges in OER is there’s tons of great repositories, there’s tons of great stuff, but there’s not really a central place for faculty members who teach the same course to share their preparations and stuff. So we’re hoping that this stuff or that appendix B is a place for that to happen.</div><div>And appendix A we have some students who have shared some stuff, including a student who was an MS studies student, now a PhD student, who adapted our exercises into a workbook for students, replacing a $50 resource in our discipline. And then, another one who used the undergrad book, found our stuff, peer reviewed for us, and then ended up writing a guide for other students on how to use Mendeley.</div><div>So we’re excited to see where this stuff goes, and with that I’m going to leave it to up questions, I think is next.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you, Matt. And thank you to all four of our guests for getting us started and sharing your experience so far with your projects. This is the time when we turn to everyone in the call and invite you to ask your questions in the chat as Emily has just done, thank you, Emily. Also feel free to unmute if you prefer. So, question from Emily, which is for Mary Leigh, how did you all manage the collaboration on this international project?</div><div>Did you all have online meetings or mainly provide updates via email or some other tool? Sounds like part of what Emily is wondering about are different time zones.</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> Yes, we learned time zones quite well during this. So it was a combination, for the four of us, between Blacksburg and Dublin, Ireland, the four of us communicated all the time. We had lots of online meetings, etc. As we expanded that, of course, then when we had our chapter editors were from four different countries, the authors in the end, we ended up with 23 chapters, 44 co-authors from 16 countries.</div><div>And so, the way we ended up, we used shared Google docs a lot and Google documents and things a lot that way. And mostly it was that the four of us just tried to stay on top of everything and touching base with each other all the time. So, yeah, we have some ideas going forward about how to get more efficient at some of that of course but being able to get into shared drives was really good, shared documents of all kinds.</div><div>Because when we were talking to each other, we could all be looking at the same thing and you didn’t have to share screens and all of that.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Go ahead.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> No, I think we’re picking up on the same thing, Karen, so go ahead.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> I was just going to ask our other guests if they could speak to how they would coordinate and get together, was it through Zoom? How was most of the work done? Asynchronously, synchronously, sprinted.</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> So, in Idaho, we have two time zones, we have mountain and Pacific. And at one point, we were also working really closely with the Rebus Community as part of their textbook success program. So we were navigating cohorts and collaborating even just in conversation with cohorts from other time zones as well. And at least in Idaho what that ended up meaning for me in managing the project was holding separate office hours to basically do a second presentation off of the curriculum that was openly licensed.</div><div>So we could do so pretty effectively. And what that snowballed into especially because this coincided with the rise of the global pandemic and the shutdown and remote work of all of us, is that we all became very familiar with Zoom. And we all recognized the importance of making time not for really long sweeping meetings or coworking sessions but making sure that there were just regularly scheduled check ins where people could drop in if they had questions, if they had concerns, if they needed feedback and so on.</div><div>And so that consistent and sustained engagement through synchronous means, one it was easier for me to facilitate to just have 30 minutes here or there, even multiple times a day. Even in addition to all of the other workload that I had. It’s one of those things that also a tool like Zoom though I think I can probably speak for everyone, we all have a healthy dose of Zoom fatigue at this point, it doesn’t have to just be me who’s also coordinating these meetings. People could have these ad hoc.</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> One of the things that I would also just point out is that in addition to the tools, it’s also about the resources that each university has. And the parts of the collaboration that really worked were our collaboration worked with the instructional design and educational technologists with our institutional partners. And what we ended up bringing to the table as a teaching focused institution was a lot of student labor, was a lot of graduate assistance.</div><div>Students who could read and write and provide feedback on the textbook that R1s wouldn’t necessarily have.</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> To facilitate communications we did a couple of things, we had Zoom meetings, and we worked across multiple time zones within our editing team, as well as our authors, so that was crazy. We did do a lot of email type communications, the one thing we found worked well most of the time was that since we had three editors and so many authors, we divided our authors into groups with each editor having a team of five to six people that they were working with directly.</div><div>And so we did smaller group discussions, if you want to think about it that way. And we really facilitated most of our communications then that way. And then I was just sending out general communications broadly about deadlines and just cheerful encouragement and keeping people as a group caught up. But I think it was really helpful that we divided people into groups with different editors.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thanks, Donna and everyone else. I think all of the four speakers have highlighted the joys and the positives of being able to collaborate and the relationships and networks they’re building with whether it’s authors, editors, students, other teaching faculty that you’ve worked with. But Elizabeth Batte is asking in the chat and they wonder if you have any project management advice for a team that might never have met each other before, never worked together before.</div><div>How do you navigate the challenges of starting off a project with strangers, but ending up being very close over the time you’ve worked together?</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> So for us, I’ll just say it helped that we by design were focusing on things that we had in common, at least for the individual faculty groups. They were there because they were all faculty who taught specific courses, even if they were at different institutions. And so, they had that shared professional affinity. Then, from there, affinities just snowballed in that then all of a sudden we were all navigating collectively a global pandemic.</div><div>We were all becoming much more well versed in Zoom. I should also say that the faculty who I was working with, many of whom had never taught online before or in an emergency remote context, they were thrilled that they had been introduced to Zoom really quickly as part of this program. It was easier for them to navigate back in March 2020.</div><div>But that said, it was really one of the things that was most exciting for me to see because we were focusing on what we want to do in terms of assessment and student experience first is that we were also seeing where assessment and pedagogical strategy aligned across the disciplines. And so, all of a sudden we had math faculty who were finding creative ideas about how they could better assess students in their courses from our German faculty.</div><div>And so just making room and space for those kind of organic conversations to happen that were a little bit outside of just open publishing was hugely helpful.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> And I’ll say it might be of interest, Elizabeth, the math team that Jonathan might be referring to comprised not only of folks from institutions, but also high school instructors and teachers. So also navigating that difference in the way these courses are taught, based on whether they’re working with high school students or college students, I think. Making space for that conversation can be helpful.</div><div>Any of the other authors want to talk about what project management for the team was like? Mary Leigh, anything you have to share with your 44 contributors?</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> Well, just one part, it was helpful to us at the different levels to have the master calendar and that action thing about who was supposed to be doing what when and have everybody have access to it. And that helped with communication as well because we could individually go in and put updates in it. And you didn’t have to email everybody else and check. And obviously as you would expect it didn’t always work smoothly, but it was helpful to do that. One good tool, I think.</div><div><strong>Anita:</strong> So I would jump in regarding that question about project management. There is a lot of tracking that we do on the backend of just what’s the status of this chapter? Where is the author? Has the author dropped? Is there another co-author? Did they sign their contributor agreement? Do we have it? Just all of those things, there’s a lot of tracking that is needed to keep things moving and to keep them organized.</div><div>So some of that Mary Leigh developed herself, some of it we developed collaboratively. And then, the production team had our own things that we had organized and so it was really quite a few different teams working together toward the same end. But every project is a little different and the way that people work is a little different. Some tools don’t work for people, so what I usually do is ask well, how would you like to organize this?</div><div>What seems to make sense? And this is how we’ve done it in the past, but we can do it completely differently, if that doesn’t work. Sometimes we develop tools and we don’t use them and that’s okay. But we try to develop things that are useful, but it’s a lot of that on the fly.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Jonathan, I see you mention… Go ahead, Matt.</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> I was literally going to shout you out. Literally the Rebus guide is the thing that was the urtext I know for me going into it. I’m throwing in the chat, I did link to this before, so building off some of the stuff in there, building off some of the MOUs that were shared. This is I think most of the stuff that I used for editing, writing, dissemination, either reflections or MOUs, grant management, any of that sort of stuff should be anonymized or de-identified. So hopefully that’s of help to people.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thank you, Matt, thanks for the shout out. I always find it helpful to see what documents others have created so we don’t have to duplicate that ourselves. I think that goes back to the sustainability and scalability of this work. If you’re creating something new for every product, then you’re going to find your time in the work week filling up very quickly.</div><div>Jonathan, you mentioned in the chat having the shared documentation with Teams and templates has been useful. Can you tell us more about what templates you put together for these fellows?</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> It always happens at least once a meeting. So as I mentioned, we were navigating multiple time zones and also multiple institutions. And so it meant that in some cases we had duplicate meetings, some that were facilitated by me, some that were facilitated by our Rebus counterparts and others. And so, it was helpful to have something as simple as a shared Google doc where folks could record questions or ideas.</div><div>And effectively what that gave me or escalated up to me was a list of these are the tools or the hurdles or the barriers that our fellows are confronting as they’re trying to wrap their minds around open publishing and open authoring and remixing and how they would present content to students, how they would make it accessible. How they would fold that into their pedagogical concerns for a class.</div><div>And that document would then end up structuring not only to-do lists for me, but also what other opportunities, demos, additional trainings I might stand up to meet needs as they were emerging. And I think it was a really necessary kind of counter-question. I’ve been talking a lot about the synchronous engagement. But the synchronous engagement was continuously effective because they were always drop in, that was always the expectation was not that these are going to be required.</div><div>But making sure that we also had that asynchronous documentation that said, “This is what’s upcoming, this is what the priority is.” And that way the folks who wanted to be there, who needed to be there would show up.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> It’s helpful to know what the mix of the responsive changes you can make with the synchronous but having the asynchronous documents to lean back on proved useful. I know that there was a question in the chat for Donna from Emily. Just wondering about how to deal with folks joining projects, but also leaving or having to shift focus to other responsibilities midway. So how did you cover some of those gaps, or how did you deal with that big challenge of maybe losing an author?</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> We decided given we had a substantial number of topics and chapters still in the book that 14 is probably enough and we shouldn’t be too upset. So we have put those in a list that we honestly are starting for that second volume, that we’ll come back to those authors and maybe start working with them, even within the next 18 to 24 months. So they have a chance to do that, and as we build that resource, then we’ll start looking at that volume.</div><div>And that’s because we are part of a program, the students are part of a program and there’s some continued communication. So we’re not losing people necessarily completely out of our circle.</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> So Apurva knows that we lost two faculty pretty quickly into the program. It was a matter of this being a three-semester program, a pandemic, and folks’ contracts not being renewed for the Fall. And what that meant for at least one group is that they were going to have to completely revise what they were planning to do, not only because of the nature of that person’s dual appointment with a community college, but also with being embedded in a high school for dual credit courses.</div><div>And that person no longer had a specific collaborator for his specific course. At the same time, he had disciplinary collaborators, and this was another one of those happy accidents with the design of not focusing on okay, their goal is to create a French textbook. Instead it was what open resources would benefit your instruction in these specific French courses? And so instead what that has emerged to be is a process or a project where it’s more curatorial in scope.</div><div>Because there’s already a lot of good French language instruction resources that have been developed by not only post-secondary faculty, but also high school teachers in Idaho. And he’s going through and curating in a Pressbook the resources that he would use and also standing up some additional meta commentary about how he would use them and what assignments or assessments he would also pair with those resources. So it worked out. I expected attrition, just not within weeks of starting.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> It’s always tough to deal with, but as you were saying earlier on, your focus on pedagogy as well I think was really helpful especially for some of these language instructors where they’re thinking really closely about how students are responding to the materials in front of them. So they were even able to take away some of those pieces, even if they couldn’t stick around to participate in the program in the way that they had intended to at the start. Mary Leigh, did you also experience this with your large team?</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> Yeah, so for us, a few chapters that we thought we were going to have, and we never could get them revised to where they needed to be. But our project is set up so that we’re continuing to solicit new chapters, we have four underway at the moment. And it’s going to work that the new ones as each chapter is completed, it will be posted for free download.</div><div>And then, at some time, going forward we’ll do a second compilation. And so like with one of those chapters that just didn’t make it in time to be in the first compilation, we are still working with that person, we think there’s hope, we got them a co-author. We think there’s hope there, but otherwise a couple yeah, we just lost them and let it go.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> That’s a shame, but that creative problem solving as Donna was describing of okay, let’s think ahead to the second edition. Part of this OER process is also so much of ideating and thinking about well, we want to start off with this particular textbook replacement, but we’d eventually like to grow all the way to something so much larger.</div><div>So starting to jot those down, whether it’s in your Google sheets or whatever tools you’re using can be so helpful. Karen, I’ll ask you if there are any other questions that have passed in the chat that we might have missed?</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> There is a question from Marty, who is wondering if any of your teams involved graduate assistants in the process. And if you were able to offload a share of the work onto them, and if so, how or if that altered your management plans? And then, after Marty’s question I would like to hear a little bit more about the grant application processes I know some of you are involved with. So any graduate assistants?</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> Yeah, we used graduate assistants on our project, they were brought on as student advisors, so from the beginning of the project they were providing feedback on the textbook outline, the proposal for the textbook and then on early drafts and then final drafts as well. Some of the challenges are students have a lot of other things on their plate. It was nice that we were able, since we got funding, to provide some small stipends, like $250 to students.</div><div>And to really pick out the students who would do really well with that resource, but at the same time, these were maybe the students that we didn’t need to reach. These are probably the students that would have been fine with a commercial textbook that’s very difficult to understand. And that it might have been more beneficial for our project to choose students whose work we may not have liked as much in our class.</div><div>And that may have really benefitted from struggling through another textbook and pointing out where some of those things might be challenging.</div><div><strong>Marty:</strong> To clarify, this is a graduate assistant that has been introduced late in the process, and it’s more of a I’m not going to have time, so she is probably going to have to do some of this mechanical stuff for me. And I’m like ah, oh, okay. I hope you’re the one doing the writing because you’re the one getting paid. So I’m just curious as to if anybody ran into anything like that.</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> I have, I’ve had mixed luck with graduate assistants. I’ve had graduate assistants who have been absolutely outstanding and people who have also authored. And then there are people who have not understood Pressbooks and who have tried to edit a PDF instead of editing the Pressbooks.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Go ahead, Jonathan.</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> I was just going to say that because ours was part of a structured fellowship program we were able upfront to say that one of the stipulations for applying is that if you’re a faculty member you need support from your department in terms of applying for this. Recognizing that they’re going to value this work, that they think it’s a worthwhile use of your time because it is going to be time consuming in ways that we can’t possibly predict.</div><div>But also importantly, the resulting cohort most of them came from a community college, so graduate assistants weren’t really an option. At the same time, that became a really formative lesson for all of us, because I’m a faculty at heart as well. And sharing is exceedingly difficult, especially when you’re supposed to be an authority in a classroom.</div><div>And a well-defined part of the fellowship early on was that for the second two semesters you were going to be iterating and launching content that was probably incomplete in real time with students. And so, though we didn’t have GAs involved in the process, we absolutely had students involved, and they were the students who were actually taking these courses and interacting with the content in real time.</div><div>And everything from being student fact checkers to proofreaders to actually weighing in on how their faculty could do this better.</div><div><strong>Marty:</strong> And our group does want to involve some of their students during this creation process just to get their feedback. So, it’s encouraging to hear that you were doing something similar to that.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Definitely. And I just wanted to maybe invite Donna to share as well, because the book that they’re authoring is comprised mainly of graduate student authors. So Donna, I’m wondering whether you have any advice about how to on board and settle these students into what might seem like larger scale projects? Anita was having a conversation in the chat about guides and documents that might help, but what was the experience like for you navigating the student workers and student collaborators also through the pandemic?</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> Well, I think most people abided by the guide, or really referred to it. And perhaps because they are grad students, and they have this in their head idea that they need to follow the directions. And I’m a faculty member responsible for a program. So, we’ve talked all along that I had an advantage that the graduate student authors also were students in the program, so there was accountability outside of this project, which I didn’t really utilize but they could see it that way.</div><div>And then, none of our authors were able to utilize graduate students in their work, simply because of where they were and where they are. So, I know when this question was asked I’m like I’m not sure this really applies to us because a good portion of our authors were grad students when they at least started writing. And we do have one of the current students in the program is helping us doing some editing before we move into Pressbooks.</div><div>And then, she’s being trained in Pressbooks, and she will be the one really helping us make that piece happen. So now a conversation needs to occur of she’s being paid, but certainly nothing stunning. And so we want to be able to think about how to recognize her in our team, because she’s really contributing something different than others to the book.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Speaking of payment and financing, Mary Leigh, in the beginning you mentioned that you applied for special project funding with the ASABE. Matt, you mentioned when we were planning this session that you’ve worked on multi-institutional grant applications. And something you said that really stuck with me was that you could talk about the lumpy distribution of resources. And I like that description of lumpy.</div><div>So Mary Leigh, Matt, and anyone else could you please speak to the process of securing those resources and then the challenges? Maybe there’s some upsides of distributing those resources?</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> I’d like to say so yeah, we got some money from ASABE. But in the end, the way it worked out, VT publishing actually paid for the publishing. And Anita will have to tell us through where that money came from. I know they told me, but I was happy to get the money, so I have to say we did not personally go after that money.</div><div>But the partnership between VT publishing and ASABE and then us as members in that really made that happen. And so, it was really through their open textbook publishing program from VT publishing.</div><div><strong>Anita:</strong> Yeah, so we worked with the Open Textbook Network’s publishing pilot, and the intro to bio systems was created through that partnership with the vendor Scribe. So, the funding for that came from a grant from the Open Education initiative at the university libraries, which is funded by the libraries. And it came from Virginia Tech publishing, because they fund editorial production, those types of things.</div><div>It was more than we thought it would be, but this really was a pilot, this is the first book that we worked on with them. It’s a different kind of process than we have done in the past, but we are all about experiments and trying to find out what works, what works better, why it works. And so I think it was pulling resources from lots of different places as well, we do too.</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> Yeah, just to jump in, I think one of the things that was probably a challenge just for our project getting funded at all is that we are redesigning a resource that’s used in 20% graduate classes. And that is a big challenge when most grant programs are faced with trying to bring in savings for students and justifiably so. I think one of the things that was a bit clever about our project was that we were able to stitch together inter-institutional partnerships.</div><div>And by redesigning the same small low-enrollment classes at multiple institutions, we were able to make similar or better arguments for cost savings than maybe redesigning your intro psych class to use the OpenStax book as a local university which probably would have been dollar for dollar very similar, but may not have been as I don’t know, I appreciated yeah. Hope that’s helpful.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thanks, Matt. I see another question here in the chat from Emily. And she says, “A lot of these collaborative projects have folks contributing to various degrees and in different roles. What strategies do you all have for managing that ebb and flow of participation? And all of the feelings associated when some participants might be taking on more than others? How have you managed all of that?”</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> So for me in my management style, and again, I think this is where it’s core understanding building relationships early on and understanding where people’s interests are and also where their skillsets are. Because the pursuit should be equity over equality in terms of involvement. And specifically our math group there’s a lot of different expertise there in math, that we have a lot of common edX math courses, all the math faculty also taught courses outside of the specific framework.</div><div>And so, it meant that some maybe had interest in higher level math concepts than others. But it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be critically engaged in really meaningful ways. For instance, one of our math faculty became the LaTeX expert, because he was a LaTeX expert. And he became a real dedicated resource for the technical authoring of the equations in their book.</div><div>Whereas others were more bold, because they were more established in their career, they were tenured. And they were interested in really iterating with students on the fly, in their classroom, experimenting with things. And they were much more bold in their sharing, because they felt more protected. And so naturally, they all found their roles, and again, it was just a matter of recognizing each other as people, I would say.</div><div>And there was another group where because of the administrative role, the dual employment that one of the contributors had, she had to pull out to a certain degree when they were actually developing and curating and pulling together the resource in this Pressbook. And it was, as I mentioned, a large Pressbook, it was 2,000 pages. But her skillset that was sustainable in a really volatile time was that she, because of her administrative role, knew plenty of other faculty who could assist in proofreading.</div><div>And she too could more easily manage proofreading instead of actually the creation curation efforts of the book. And so, again, I think it’s affording people some grace and I think that we all had the benefit of the last couple of years to recognize that grace can be in short supply in this kind of work. And so recognizing where people have different experiences and making time and space for that.</div><div><strong>Donna:</strong> I think one of my more challenging management situations might have been just trying to be equitable between the two other co-editors. And they have a lot of grace for each other, and at times I might have spoken to them about you don’t have to have that much grace for the other person. You need to have – Anita’s laughing – that you have your opportunities, and you need to realize that this person needs to also do the work.</div><div>And you’re being so gracious, that maybe you should pull back a little on that, because they need to be accountable to do the pieces they’re saying they’re going to do. So, that was interesting.</div><div><strong>Jonathan:</strong> I’ll say I don’t disagree with that, but I was also the enforcer. So it was my responsibility to make sure that equity was maintained.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Mary Leigh, Matt, what about on your end? Was there also an enforcer and or someone who was taking a much kinder approach?</div><div><strong>Matt:</strong> Yeah, that was me, I told you we had some issues with one of our sites. It was ultimately me doing most of that interfacing. Honestly, I haven’t fully processed that, but that’s not even a person that I talk to at this point. Yeah, it was bad.</div><div><strong>Mary Leigh:</strong> Yeah, among the four of us, the oversight crew, we kind of took turns a bit when we had to enforce a bit because it would depend who it was with. If we were talking about section editors or authors and we would help each other figure out how we should go to that person and what we should do. So I have to say it was really nice that we had a team of four that we really worked well together as it turned out.</div><div>And we have worked some together before, but we learned a whole lot during this process and so we supported each other in doing the enforcing.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Thank you. I think we’ve all learned a lot during this hour together. And so since we’re winding up, I don’t know if there’s anything, Apurva, in the chat or any unanswered questions you want to address?</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> No unanswered questions, but I will say there is a lot of discussion in the chat and maybe eagerness within the group here today to just share documentation and resources. So, I will just say for anyone who wants to continue this conversation, maybe talk to our guests as well, I dropped in a link to the Rebus forum discussion space.</div><div>Please feel free to follow up and continue to share your experiences here, even though we’re almost at our hour together. And Karen, I think you can start to close us off and express our gratitude for all of the guests and participants here today.</div><div><strong>Karen:</strong> Indeed, thank you all for joining us, Mary Leigh, Donna, Jonathan, and Matthew. And thanks to everyone who asked their questions and engaged with one another in the chat. We couldn’t have Office Hours without all of you, so thanks for joining us. We hope to see you in September.</div><div><strong>Apurva:</strong> Thank you everybody. Take care, and hopefully see you all next month.</div><div>END OF VIDEO</div><h2>Chat Transcript:</h2><div>00:12:43 Amanda Larson: Hi all, Amanda Larson, Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State joining in from Columbus, OH.</div><div>00:13:27 Marty Miller (she, her): Hi Amanda, hi Emily!</div><div>00:14:35 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): Great to see so many familiar names and faces! And hello to anyone who is at Office Hours for the first time. Welcome!</div><div>00:15:03 Anita Walz: Introduction to Biosystems Engineering: <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10919/93254">http://hdl.handle.net/10919/93254</a></div><div>00:16:34 Amanda Larson: yay Anita!</div><div>00:16:43 Matthew DeCarlo: ANITA!!!!!!</div><div>00:16:57 Anita Walz: ASABE’s page about the book: <a href="https://www.asabe.org/BE">https://www.asabe.org/BE</a></div><div>00:17:32 Anita Walz: Press release about the partnership and book: <a href="https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2021/02/univlib-intro-biosystems-engineering-text.html">https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2021/02/univlib-intro-biosystems-engineering-text.html</a></div><div>00:20:18 Anita Walz: Promo video about the book: <a href="https://vimeo.com/451302036">https://vimeo.com/451302036</a></div><div>00:20:51 Anita Walz: Teaching In The University: Learning From Grad Students And Early Career Faculty <a href="https://www1.rebus.community/#/project/98702615-f45b-402a-9e52-022a109e99fb">https://www1.rebus.community/#/project/98702615-f45b-402a-9e52-022a109e99fb</a></div><div>00:24:17 Anita Walz: If you’re game for a second edition, I am too!</div><div>00:24:27 Anita Walz: [or volume, rather…]</div><div>00:24:43 Matthew DeCarlo: haha, i’d like to see the project that scares anita</div><div>00:26:23 Anita Walz: Matt, there are plenty of projects that scare me!</div><div>00:32:10 Anita Walz: VIVA Grant info: <a href="https://vivalib.org/va/open/grants">https://vivalib.org/va/open/grants</a></div><div>00:34:52 Emily Frank (she/her): Appreciate the discussion of challenges and how you navigated them, Matt!</div><div>00:34:54 Matthew DeCarlo: Textbook: <a href="https://pressbooks.rampages.us/msw-research/">https://pressbooks.rampages.us/msw-research/</a></div><div>Project management files: <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xUo--8LrpQmDpV8oxDgpLlQYY5_Zh7A5">https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xUo–8LrpQmDpV8oxDgpLlQYY5_Zh7A5</a></div><div>00:35:09 Emily Frank (she/her): A question for Mary Leigh: how did you all managed the collaboration on this international project? Did you all have online meetings or mainly provide updates via email (or some other tool)?</div><div>00:35:43 Elizabeth Batte (she/they): Any advice on project management for a team who has never previously met/worked together?</div><div>00:36:36 Donna Westfall-Rudd (she/her): I neglected to mention that we kicked off our project with the development of possible reader personas to help our authors think about and remember who we all were writing to. The personas were created by current students.</div><div>00:36:48 Donna Westfall-Rudd (she/her): We will include them in our introduction section</div><div>00:37:38 Emily Frank (she/her): For Donna, since you had some folks leave the project from your team of 17 (!) did you onboard new authors mid-project or cover the gaps they left in some other way? Curious how you managed that</div><div>00:37:40 Matthew DeCarlo: Google Docs for original outlines and planning…but directly into Pressbooks for the final book</div><div>00:39:19 Andrea Scott (She/Her): Jonathan, Do you have a link you can share for OPAL? I believe that’s the acronym.</div><div>00:40:26 Jonathan Lashley: Andrea: I am drafting a report on the pilot cohort right now that will be published at Idaho.pressbooks.pub by the end of the month.</div><div>00:40:41 Anita Walz: The cheerful encouragement, Donna, is really helpful!</div><div>00:40:59 Andrea Scott (She/Her): Excellent! Thanks, Jonathan.</div><div>00:42:15 Matthew DeCarlo: our author team already knew each other very well, so i’m less able to speak to this. however, even in our group, the role of developmental editor was really important. and keeping an open document of “continuity” issues that emerged as the textbook was written (even after the original planning and outlining)</div><div>00:42:32 Matthew DeCarlo: someone should hold all of the knowledge about what goes where and how ideas are presented in the book</div><div>00:42:42 Donna Westfall-Rudd (she/her): Emily – we only lost 4 chapters so we decided not to try to have someone replace those chapters. Instead, we have started a list for the next volume.</div><div>00:42:59 Elizabeth Batte (she/they): Thank you all for your feedback – very helpful!!</div><div>00:43:17 Emily Frank (she/her): @Donna — thank you!</div><div>00:43:47 Marty Miller (she, her): Did any of your team members involve their GAs in the process and offload a share of work onto them? If so, how did that alter your management plans?</div><div>00:44:03 Jonathan Lashley: Yes! Templates and shared documentation are key</div><div>00:45:29 Matthew DeCarlo: Project management files: <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xUo--8LrpQmDpV8oxDgpLlQYY5_Zh7A5">https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xUo–8LrpQmDpV8oxDgpLlQYY5_Zh7A5</a></div><div>00:45:39 Elizabeth Batte (she/they): Yes – shared documents has been a great asset in smoothing out the process in the beginning</div><div>00:45:51 Anita Walz: The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) <a href="https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/">https://press.rebus.community/the-rebus-guide-to-publishing-open-textbooks/</a></div><div>00:48:18 Anita Walz: Jonathan and Matt, how did you onboard your editors and authors? What readings/content were helpful for getting people oriented to start working?</div><div>00:49:01 Matthew DeCarlo: author guide and review guide, based on the rebus templates…and for reviewers a lot of gratitude</div><div>00:49:14 Jonathan Lashley: Yeah, what Matt said</div><div>00:51:33 Anita Walz: Thanks, Jonathan and Matt. This has been a challenging part of the process for me.</div><div>00:51:56 Matthew DeCarlo: what part has been challenging??</div><div>00:53:01 Anita Walz: The volume of topics to cover: Orientation and what to do about copyright, open licensing, ideal timelines, accessibility . . . .</div><div>00:55:40 Matthew DeCarlo: people don’t read the guide?</div><div>00:56:28 Anita Walz: Some do. Our processes are somewhat different than the guide because we work with the Publishing group at VT.</div><div>00:58:39 Emily Frank (she/her): Marty’s comment made me think of the challenge of any group project where you have individuals contributing to different degrees. Did you all have strategies for managing the ebb and flow of participation and the feelings associated with that when some participants are taking more on than others?</div><div>00:58:59 Marty Miller (she, her): Good question, Emily.</div><div>01:00:17 Jonathan Lashley: @Anita, I just emailed Emily Frank (also on the call) about her onboarding resources today at LOUIS. She may have some ideas. I rant into some of the same obstacles you mentioned and pulled specific content from the guides when needed in discussion. In other words, the guides were reference materials instead of guiding texts.</div><div>01:02:24 Anita Walz: @Jonathan, thanks. That’s a good insight. I’ve since designed an outline of all of the things to cover. This is something I want to better document this year — and to pull in external materials where they fit well.</div><div>01:04:24 Emily Frank (she/her): @Anita and Jonathan, In our project we currently have underway, we have started with a training phase that everyone worked through. We have onboarded two individuals later/following the training phase. I have tried to offer a compressed ~1.5 hr live session. But it is a challenge because other participants spent weeks on the training. The training materials are available to all to work through. But it is challenging to onboard mid project.</div><div>01:05:35 Emily Frank (she/her): The balance between grace and accountability</div><div>01:06:42 Jonathan Lashley: Anita and Emily: it sounds like a remix project that we all should but probably don’t have time to pursue. ?</div><div>01:06:55 Emily Frank (she/her): I appreciate you all sharing that because it is helpful to recognize these issues come up in projects!</div><div>01:06:55 Anita Walz: @jonathan lol</div><div>01:07:03 Matthew DeCarlo: you all are amazing!!! thank you to my co-presenters and to everyone who came!!!</div><div>01:07:05 Apurva Ashok (she/her/hers): <a href="https://www.rebus.community/t/office-hours-managing-inter-institutional-authoring-teams/5746">https://www.rebus.community/t/office-hours-managing-inter-institutional-authoring-teams/5746</a></div><div>01:07:43 Marty Miller (she, her): Thanks everyone for sharing your expertise!</div><div>01:07:46 Amanda Larson: Thanks all!</div><div>01:07:49 Anita Walz: @jonathan – would be happy to talk further about onboarding.</div><div>01:07:49 Sheryl Shook: Thank you very much!</div><div>01:07:49 Allison Brown: Thank you!</div><div>01:07:50 Sunyeen Pai: Thank you for this great discussion. It was very nice to see everyone!</div><div>01:07:51 Andrea Scott (She/Her): Thanks everyone!</div><div>01:07:51 Emily Frank (she/her): Thank you!</div><div>01:07:52 Anita Walz: Thanks all!</div>admintag:open.umn.edu,2005:Spina::Blog::Post/352021-08-09T12:00:00Z2022-01-14T18:39:09ZOEN Welcomes New Members<div>At the Open Education Network (OEN), we’re excited to see our community continue to grow, strengthening and enriching our collective efforts to transform open education and serve the common good.<br><br></div><div>Inspired by such growth, we’re returning to the practice of regularly announcing those who’ve joined in recent months.<br><br></div><div>To each of the OEN new members listed here, as well as the many other institutions that joined earlier in 2021, we extend a sincere welcome! We look forward to learning, collaborating, and achieving together.<br><br></div><div><br></div><h3>June - July 2021</h3><ul><li>The Citadel</li><li>Holyoke Community College</li><li>Oregon Institute of Technology</li><li>Villanova University</li><li>Salem State University</li><li>Framingham State University</li><li>Colorado Northwestern Community College</li><li>University of Oregon</li><li>Trident Technical College</li><li>Aiken Technical College</li><li>University of Central Florida</li><li>Florida SouthWestern State College</li><li>Pasco-Hernando State College</li><li>Florida State College at Jacksonville</li><li>Seminole State College of Florida</li><li>University of North Florida</li><li>Grand Rapids Community College</li><li>St. Louis Community College</li><li>Robert Morris University</li><li>Millersville University</li><li>Franklin & Marshall College</li><li>Indian Hills Community College</li><li>University of Massachusetts Lowell</li><li>Grand View University</li><li>University of Southern Indiana</li><li>University of Michigan, Ann Arbor</li><li>Butler Community College</li><li>Wilmington College</li><li>Northern Essex Community College</li><li>Hiram College</li><li>University of Florida</li><li>Haverford College</li><li>Kirkwood Community College</li><li>Roxbury Community College</li><li>Springfield Technical Community College</li><li>Iowa Central Community College</li><li>Orbis Cascade Alliance</li><li>University of North Carolina Wilmington</li><li>Rowan University</li><li>Pacific University Oregon</li><li>New Jersey Institute of Technology</li><li>Midwestern Collaborative for Library Services</li><li>American Indian Higher Education Consortium</li><li>Massachusetts Maritime Academy</li><li>Massachusetts Bay Community College</li><li>Marywood University</li><li>Lafayette College</li><li>Harrisburg University of Science & Technology</li><li>Gustavus Adolphus College</li><li>DeSales University</li><li>College of DuPage</li><li>Chatham University</li></ul><div><br></div><div>To see our comprehensive membership listing, visit the <a href="https://open.umn.edu/otn/members/">OEN Membership page</a>.<br><br></div>admin