Estimated reading time for this article:
32
minutes.
Speakers:
Christina Trunnell (Assistant Dean, Montana State University Library)
Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, The Ohio State University)
Christina: All right, well, welcome everyone today. My name's Christina Trunnell. I am one of your Pub101 curriculum committee members. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's session with the amazing Amanda Larson. Just a couple of things as we get started, I'm going to share the Pub101 class notes, where you'll see transcripts from each session, and links to all of the relevant materials. I also want to remind you all that we adhere to the OEN's community norms, which you can see on our OEN Community Hub, which is a great resource. I will be monitoring the chat as we go through today's session. If you have questions, please feel free to put those in, and we'll make sure that those get covered today.
So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Amanda Larson, who joins us as the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Idaho. Goodness, I gave you a completely wrong location. Ohio State University, where she creates professional development opportunities for staff, librarians, and instructors around open pedagogy and open educational practices. Amanda's also the co-chair of our Pub101 curriculum committee, and was an incredible driving force and leader in creating the curriculum that you are going through this course with today. So thank you, Amanda.
Amanda: That was extremely kind. You moved me across the country and back. I'm so excited. It was such a good trip. All right, let me share my screen, and then we'll get started. I am here to talk to you today about publishing program capacity. Let me turn you back into a gallery view, so I can see folks. Then I'm going to go ahead and drop the link to the slides in the chat. If you want to follow along or download any of the...click any of the links. You should be able to do so. All right, let's get started. I am Amanda Larson. I have a long trajectory in this environment of publishing. When I got my first master's degree in literature, I was the editorial assistant at the Journal of Narrative Theory.
There, I started getting questions from authors around their copyrights and their rights as authors, and would they be able to put their work inside institutional repositories. It was the first time that I was exposed to the idea of open publishing in the sense of it being connected to academic work and instructional materials. Up until that point, I was totally in the open source software arena of thinking about open content. Then I got my library degree at UW Madison, and I was able to get a teaching assistantship there as the open educational resources teaching assistant. In that role, things were very grassroots at UW Madison, and I was able to work with a really, really intensely engaged group of passionate advocates for making their materials openly licensed.
What I provided for them were Pressbooks training, doing troubleshooting Pressbooks for them, helping them think through the pedagogical implications of using OER in their classroom. Then after I graduated, I was the open education librarian at Penn State, where I co-ran the affordable course transformation grant program. We built that from the ground up. We started it and iterated on it over the two and a half years that I was there. Then I moved to Ohio State where I work as the affordable learning instructional consultant, and I do a grant project support for the Affordable Learning Exchange.
My work right now really centers around curation of resources for instructors, and also thinking about racial equity. I support the racial justice grants, which I'll talk about a little bit later, and also open pedagogy. So once you have open content, how do you teach with it? I like to provide an agenda. We're going to talk about why you might want a publishing program. We're going to talk about how you might develop that publishing program, thinking about a couple different institutional contexts that you might do that in. We're going to think through about who's doing the work, and think about that in the idea of capacity building.
We're going to talk about a couple building definitions and then communication training and then community building. So, how do you build a community at your institution? What do you want to think through in that? Then importantly, self-care and then some considerations for doing this kind of work. I think that if you are at the very beginning of your program building, it's really important to think through the why of what you're doing. So, understanding why you're doing this will help you think through what your program needs, and it all can build on top of that question of why. Lots of different institutions have lots of different why's, so it could be that that was handed down to you as a mandate from admin at your institution.
It could be that there's an underlying need that you're responding to. It could be part of a larger initiative on campus. It might support your goals for outreach. Then you might also want to think about how people would be participating as part of that why, and why you would pick adoption, adaptation or authoring at your institution. And is part of the why that it is part of your outreach strategy. Thinking through why for your program will help you decide probably about the what and the how going forward.
So thinking about some different scenarios that you might have for starting a program. It could be that there is pressure from student government to help make textbooks more affordable, or to do course markings. They're really focusing on the cost, so helping them be better able to afford that. And so you might partner with student government to start a publishing program or an OER program, or it could be that you have a top-down mandate from administration. Admin is super interested in OER, and they want a program to happen, and so now you have to spin up a publishing program based around OER. It could be part of a larger initiative of affordability on your campus, and so it could be or a larger initiative focused on open at your campus. So, it could be that you already have done quite a bit of work in the open access arena, and now you are spreading out into open education.
Those are just some ideas of thinking about... It could be a grassroots thing where your faculty are super interested in doing this kind of work, and are early adopters. So, it could also be that. So thinking through the why is where we're going to start off when we think about building a program.
There are two open textbook development approaches that I have identified in lots of conversations with my peers. I do a lot of mentoring for people running programs. What I see most often is either there's this do-it-yourself model where there's one person, or it's a very small team of people, and oftentimes, you might be doing it off the side of your desk in this instance. It might be a duty as assigned in this instance.
Then there's also this publishing program and then larger electronic book publishing services that it might be a part of that. So, they have some commonalities. They're each going to have goals. You're going to need to identify support in both of them. If you're working in a larger publishing program, you're going to want to identify partners pretty early on. In a one-person show model, you're going to want to make sure that you have your expectations defined really clearly. Make sure that you clearly communicate what you can and cannot do, and then you're going to want to probably do a lot of teach the teacher or train the trainer model instruction around publishing for instructors inside your community.
You'll see that some of those things are also in the other ones. You're going to define roles, and you're going to clearly communicate again. They're both going to need you to build a community, and those communities might look different. There's also this idea about self-care that is going to be present in both of those models that we want to encourage you to keep an eye on. I have been doing this for a while, and thinking about starting your program from a place where you're building around your capacity to begin with rather than having to scale back, because your over capacity is a great way to go.
So if you're identifying support, one of the first things you're going to want to think through is what services are you willing you have the capacity to support? So, this could look like working with authors to author new work, so you're going to create brand new OER from scratch. They're not going to have any other content. I've run into this quite a bit, where authors already have a lot of content that they're using in their classes that they have authored, and they just want to turn it into shiny textbook, where that's all co-located in one location.
It could be that they have nothing, and they're really going to go through a whole textbook development process, where they're going to identify what content they want to put in there, and they are going to work on out the structure of what the book looks like, and then provide content. That could be them as solo authors. It could be also them identifying a suite of authors in their discipline, who they want to work with to help do that. It could also be that they are... You might be deciding that you would work with authors to adapt in remix work, so they're going to start with probably an existing OER, and then adapt it within the scope of the license that it has to localize it for their particular context in their classroom.
It could also be working with others to make materials culturally relevant, or to incorporate racial justice curriculum into it. So, this could be that they're going to take an OER that already exists, and then they are going to say, "This book doesn't have enough representation. I want to resource all of the images, and I want to think about diverse naming conventions for examples inside of the book." They're doing that kind of work then, which fits into that localization, but also with an I to equity. Then you're going to want to think through what tools you can offer to your faculty to create and remix works.
This is where I always encourage you to take a look at what already exists at your institution. So, maybe you're a Google school, and you have access to Google Suite. Maybe instead of it turning into a book, it's a Google site, or they're going to do all of their authoring inside of Google Docs, and then maybe it'll go live somewhere else afterwards. It could be that you have a license for Pressbooks or Manifold, or you want to try editing with Scribe, or you want to build your OER inside your learning management system or LMS at your institution. So, what tools can you offer to your faculty to create remix works?
I could even add more ideas to this list now, so PubPub is a great option to think about for content authoring. Then after this is all done, they have created their product. Where does this live? So, is it going to live inside your institutional repository if you have one? Are you publishing it on the OER Commons? Is it getting published on the web, in the LMS? If it's a Pressbook, will you turn it on so that it can be part of the Pressbook directory? Those are all questions to think through as you're starting to think about identifying the support you need. One of the things is after you've decided what kind of topics, what kind of projects you will be supporting, you might want to consider the following questions.
So thinking through, how many projects can you take on to start with? I would always encourage you to start with less rather than more. It's really easy to build in scalability if you start small. It's really hard to back off after you have...say you start with 10 projects. It's really hard to say the next cycle, we're only taking five. It's hard to explain that to admin. Well, you did 10 last year. Why can't you do 10 this year? So thinking about starting, I would even encourage starting with one or two, maybe three projects to begin with, and seeing how it goes. What is the process like?
Because after you have gone through that first cycle, a lot more things about your capacity are going to be clear to you, and you're going to understand how much work it takes, what kind of authors that you are working with, what their needs are. So if you start small, you also want to think about how many you'd want to add to the next cycle to scale your program up. So if you work with three this time, will you do five next time? Then thinking about what you can do to make your program sustainable. So, there are a lot of aging successful programs that are out there who have been doing this for five or six years or 10 years, and have reached this point now of thinking through, "Okay, so we scaled up. We got all of these dollars in cost savings, but now we don't have any funding left. What happens now?"
That's the situation that Ohio State is in is that they had a huge grant, and they did a lot of great work over the last five or six years, and now there is no money left to do grants. Without finding more funding, we have to figure out what that looks like in the future. So thinking at the very beginning of your program like, "What are your sustainability portions in this?" That counts also not just for funding, but also thinking about how are the OER that your instructors are creating? How are those sustainable? Do they have a sustainability plan? What does their edits and revision cycle look like?
When I was running my grant program, I always had folks teach with their materials for a year or at least at the very least a semester to get an idea of, "You created this thing. Now, what's missing? What do you need to add?" Extra credit for students to find typos is also helpful here, but helping them think through how that they're going to continue to use this material again and again in their classroom, and hopefully also helping them build the skills to make those edits themselves if you're in that one-person model, and then thinking through what is your budget like? Do you have a set amount of funds for each year? Where are those funds coming from?
Do those funds fluctuate from year to year? Is the funding soft? Are you able to request any in-kind funding? So if your grant supports up to X many dollars, does their department also kick in X many dollars, or is there a partner that you're collaborating with who also provides in-kind funding to help support the grant program? Thinking about those at the very beginning for how you're going... what you need to support these programs. In the do-it-yourself model, a good question to ask is, "Is this going to be a publishing effort that is supported through administration, or is this a grassroots campaign?"
I have seen this play out in different ways on different campuses. I have done both. At Wisconsin, it was very grassroots. At Penn State, it was very much a publishing program with lots of admin support. Those kinds of programs need different kinds of support and thinking through. Is there cash for OER, especially with COVID having happened and still going on? Trying to figure out how that has changed budgets for places has been something that has been very relevant. Is there still money to do this kind of work? Is it just you supporting all of the OER publishing efforts at your institution, or are there a few collaborators that you can lean on?
Are you working individually, you are the one person who does this work, or is there a small team of you who does this work and has conversations about what this will look like? Thinking about also, how can students participate? Can you get a student worker? Is that something that happens in your contacts pretty regularly? Can you secure a teaching assistantship for a graduate student? What does that look like? If you can do that, then you would want to think through those questions again about how that fits into your support model. Then if you have a publishing program where you have a lot of administrative support, it's really important to identify which administrators are supporting this effort.
So in my case, it was the provost, and so you'll want to think through your institutional context. Does the support come from the top down? So, is it the president of the institution? Is it the provost? Is it the unit, or does the support come from a specific outlying unit? So thinking about maybe if you have a Center for Teaching and Learning, something like that, are they doing this kind of support? At Ohio State, we have the Drake Learning Center, and they do a lot of grant funding for instructors to do professional development, and so OER could be one of those things that they are helping support.
Again, financial, where's the money coming from, again, especially with the way that COVID has changed things at our institutions? Then who's on the team? Who's going to be doing the day-to-day work? Are you the point person who is going to be interacting with all of the authors? Do you have access to production support? Is there somebody who can help put together the books for instructors? Are you collaborating with other librarians at your institution? Are you collaborating across units at your institution? Then what does the work look for each of those people?
That leads us right into talking about partners. Who has a seat at the table? One of the ways that you can think about getting started is by building a working group of stakeholders. I have pulled together here a list of some common partners for this kind of work. It's not by any ways, means, or stretch of the imagination exhaustive, but you could be working with students. You could be working with the libraries if you're not already positioned in the library. You could be working in the Center for Teaching and Learning. That could have a different name at your institution. You could be working definitely with faculty.
What is the role of your bookstore? Do you have an academic press? How do they fit into the conversation? Are there specific academic units who might want to be at the table around this conversation, and then are there institutional specific units? When I was at Penn State, there was another unit in earth sciences who had been building OER for 10 years, and they were working on a repository for OER. So, they really wanted a seat at the table to talk about OER at the institutional context level. So thinking about who can you partner with, and making sure that you at least extend the invitation for them to join in on this kind of work.
Then it's really important to define expectations, and this has multiple levels. Once you've identified what and how you can support your publishing effort, you're going to start defining the expectations around your publishing program. So, what are your expectations for faculty authors? What are they responsible for? Then what support can they expect from you? It's really good to define this ahead of time, and get it in writing. We'll talk about MOUs later, memorandums of understanding, later in the programming for Pub101, but it's great to get this in writing before you launch through that MOU process. But absolutely, it can be iterative and grow with your initiative.
I think what's really important is sitting down with faculty authors, and saying, "You can expect that I am going to do X, Y, Z for you." So in this case, it could be, "I will provide you with tool training. I will give you access to a tool that you can author in, and then I'm happy to look over the content that you put in there afterwards." That could be what they can expect for you. Then you expect them to generate the content, to source their images, and making sure that they're openly licensed. I often share a spreadsheet with faculty that allows them to keep track of everything.
I'm happy to share that in this week's class notes, but it sets it up so there's a column for the title of the place, the website where they found it, like what repository did they find it in? Is it an image that they found at an image gallery? And then what license does the content have so that they're keeping track of that because licenses need to be compatible with one another inside, or they need to be called out specifically if they're not compatible. I get them to track that information, and then I'm happy to review their list to make sure everything is compatible or if we need to make that extra call out.
So, thinking about, what are you willing to do, and what do you expect them to do in your publishing program? Which leads into talking about defining roles, so who's going to do what? This is not only your faculty instructors, but also if you're working with people across unit lines or inside the library, where does it make sense to collaborate? Do you have access to instructional designers at your institution who could help faculty create learning objectives and goals for the materials? Could they help them create maybe the template for what the textbook will look like? Can they help them scaffold that content so students are getting all of the support that they need to learn the concepts?
Then also, do you have other librarians who could help faculty curate OER? We do syllabus review grants at Ohio State, and I connect instructors to subject liaisons, and they help them find OER materials that they could use to help drive down the cost. So, they could also help faculty curate OER to remix in this instance if you're working on building out textbooks. Then maybe you also could partner with students who could advocate with the administration for your initiative. At every institution I have been at, admin listens to student voices more than they're listening to mine as a staff person. So, getting the attention of student government is also very helpful to think about how you can leverage that for your initiative.
Then also, the relationship with the bookstore differs from campus to campus, from institution to institution, so maybe you are in the position where the bookstore can help you identify courses, or provide print copies of OER at cost. So, thinking about whether you have a relationship with the bookstore that would be conducive to that, or if you have a hostile bookstore that is going to be like, "No, we don't want any part of that. We are doing our own thing. We're going to make everybody do inclusive access." Those relationships can vary from institution to institution, so it's really important to figure out whether they could be a partner or not, and then also making sure that you have set pretty clear expectations about what all these different partners are doing in the publishing program.
This cannot be stated enough. Most of your work as a project manager doing this work, and thinking about your publishing program is going to be about clearly communicating with all the stakeholders in your publishing initiative. So, this is my recommendation. You may take or leave it. I would suggest adopting an ethos of transparency. You're going to tell it how it is. It's going to be transparent, and you're going to be very clear about expectations. I think it really helps to start off that way. I think it's also really important if you're pulling together a team of people to create shared language early, if not, before you start the publishing program.
What I mean by that is, are you going to call it open educational resources? Are you going to call this an affordability initiative? What resonates more and will have more impact as you advocate at your institution? We spent at Penn State almost the entire time I was there coming up with a Penn State definition of what OER was going to be at Penn State, and what it would include and what it wouldn't include based on the affordability spectrum that we were working with there. So, figuring out what that shared language is going to be is really useful. At Ohio State, that conversation has looked about whether we're calling it curricular resources or if they're going to call it OER, or if we're going to call it affordable resources course materials, and trying to figure out what of those terms would resonate with faculty actually if we were having conversations.
Create a memorandum of understanding, an MOU, for authors that clearly details what they're agreeing to do, and articulates what you will do to support them. This is very helpful particularly if you have folks who are like, "I'm not going to make the timeline." That will happen a lot probably, and making sure that you're communicating regularly with stakeholders and also regularly with authors. Some authors will need more checking in with than others. They fall into different types. There's the people who are going to want you to hold their hand the whole time. There are people who are going to be pretty independent, and then there are going to be people who need just occasional check-ins to keep them on track, and make sure that they're still reaching towards their goals and the timeline that they set.
If you're in that do-it-yourself model, if you're going to want to heavily lean on the teach the teacher model, or train the trainer if you've heard it that way, and you want to teach your authors to be self-sufficient and self-starters. So, you might be providing training for tools. What are they publishing in? I've done a lot of Pressbooks training. I have done some Manifold training for an open journal, and we considered that for open textbooks when I was at Penn State. You'll probably be providing training around open licensing. So, what are the licenses that they can choose? How does this affect their intellectual property?
What are their intellectual property rights at your institution? It's a really good idea to take a look at the IP policy at your institution to see who owns what. For example, faculty at my institution own their copyright, but I do not as a staff member. So, everything I create has to... The license would have to be determined by the university, whether I could openly license it or not. If you think about the different categories of instructors, that might vary for them as well. So, adjuncts might have different IP rights than faculty who are on a tenure track. Then you might also want to provide training around open pedagogy.
How are they going to teach with those materials? Usually, I would say that's one of those things that you would scale up to. First, you would get some people who would make some OER, and then you would have that conversation around open pedagogy and how to teach with it. You can offer support for follow-up questions, but basically, you want to do as much upfront training to get them to be self-sufficient so that they can go off and build their book, and then come back to you. Then what those check-ins look like then is up to you. Sometimes, there would be monthly check-ins to see how they're doing, what kind of support they need.
Do you need to refer them to somebody else? So, we do a lot of referral to copyright services here at Ohio State, so thinking through those things of what you would want to provide training for, particularly if you're in that do-it-yourself model where you're going to have to be a little less hands-on in supporting the actual projects as they grow. Then I would recommend building a community. You want to start small and support only as many projects as you have capacity for over time. One way that you could do that would be to start a community of practice. So, you would introduce your authors to each other, have them share their projects, invite them to discuss what's working and what they're struggling with.
Enable them to not feel alone in the process of creating OER like that kitten says, "It's dangerous to go alone." Take this cute adorable kitten with you, because they often are going to have questions about like, "Oh, I'm trying to make this table inside Pressbooks, and I haven't really found that I've been able to do that in a way that I feel is super accessible." They can have conversations around what's working inside of the tool that you've picked, and what they're struggling with. They'll be able to help each other too, which I have also found is really useful. They can say, "Oh, I troubleshooted that by doing X, Y, Z. Here, let me show you how to do that."
So, helping them have a community of people who are doing the same thing that they're doing is really beneficial to growing your community of practice. At Wisconsin, I was in charge of facilitating the user community for Pressbooks. We started off with some Pressbooks trainings, so they would come and they would learn. We did a Pressbooks101, and then we did a Pressbooks102. The first one is like, "Here's the basic nuts and bolts of how you can use Pressbooks to author in." Then in Pressbooks102, we talked about some of the built-in tools, so hypothesis for social annotation, and H5P for some formative assessments that are interactive.
Then after that, we invited them to come share their projects, and talk about how they were using Pressbooks in their courses to build with. It got to the point where their content was what was sustaining the community of practice. They were coming to talk to each other, and we were just facilitating a time, a place, and providing any answers to questions that cropped up during those conversations, or pointing them to more resources about something they were really excited about. They can become a really great tool to leverage in your publishing program. They'll also help bring people to who they'll share their experience and say, "Oh, I had an awesome times working with Amanda. You should solely talk to her about your course in creating an OER."
The word of mouth there also could help build your program up. I want to talk about self-care and the fact that we live in a capitalistic hellscape. There's just no escaping that. Then inside of that, we also work inside academia, which is rife with its own problems. When you're doing this kind of work, there is a ton of isolation. You're usually the only person doing this. You're doing a lot of emotional labor both for the instructors that you're working with by helping them, but also, you do a lot of emotional labor when you're advocating up the chain to admin, and so thinking about the toll that that might take on you.
You also have to have really tough conversations. There's always that one instructor who wants to put some copyrighted something inside of their textbook. I've had people who wanted to put what would be extremely expensive music to license inside their book, or images that are just not ever going to be obtainable in an institutional context, and having really tough conversations with them about that. Also, tough conversations with your colleagues around the work that you do and also around... It can be tough to have those conversations where you are in a position, and you have to go and advocate for your program with admin. There can be some really tough conversations in that area.
So, it's really important to think through the self-care you might need after those conversations. Then also, some people are very resistant to learning new technologies. That might even be you yourself, and just acknowledging that that is a thing, and that that might be something you have to work around. If it is you, if you are that person who's like, "I don't want to learn another technology. I just had to learn Teams last week, because our institution switched to it," I feel you. I'm so fatigued with the amount of changes that we've had with technology over the past two years.
Just set yourself up to succeed in having those conversations around technology, and give yourself enough time to learn the tool that you might be supporting before you have to showcase it to everybody. The image on this one is a tower. I picked that because when I worked at Penn State, I literally worked in the tower. I was by myself most of the time all by myself on the third floor in a tower that had an elevator that you could only access with a key that was 100 years old, and was super scary to ride up. There were jokes about, "Oh, Amanda's Rapunzel. She's always up in that tower working." It can be literal isolation as well as just work isolation.
So, it doesn't have to be hopeless though. The one thing I want you to realize right now is that you are building a network while you are right here. All of the people in this call with you are a network that you can use. We are going through this together. You're building a community right now, and it really helps to think about starting your publishing program, and making time to build a network around open publishing to really help stifle some of that isolation. Looking for places where you can engage in conversation with other people who are doing this kind of work, particularly when you're in that startup phase, please don't hesitate to reach out people who have much for programs.
More than likely, we are more than happy to chat with you about what worked and what didn't work. I would also say that if you are in a position to where you can set boundaries, that is very helpful. It could be that you just don't answer email on the weekends, or there are boundaries around what you're willing to help with and what you can't help with, and be firm in those boundaries if you are able to. I recognized that not all of us are in places and institutions where we can do that, and that's often very sad to me. Then also for those tough questions, you can pre-plan answers. You know that there's always going to be a curmudgeonly old faculty member who is like, "I heard that OER quality is awful."
It helps to pre-plan answers to those questions so that you aren't lost in the anxiety of somebody asking you a hard question, but also that you are like, "No, actually, there's research that says OER quality is about the same if not better than traditional textbooks." There are errors in traditional textbooks all the time. The benefit of OER is that you can fix those errors immediately if you really wanted to in your localized copy. So, I would advocate for having pre-planned answers. I would say that also goes for questions that admin would have for you, so thinking about what data you're collecting. Admin are going to want cost-saving numbers.
They're going to want to know how many courses you transformed, and making sure that you're collecting that kind of data ahead of time so that you can answer those questions when they crop up is really helpful. Also, you don't have to be the master of everything. That's why it's really important to do this beginning work where you're setting up your program, and you're deciding what you do have the capacity and the ability to do, but maybe you don't have the ability to copy edit, but your grant funding does have a little bit of extra money where you could hire a copy editor, even if it's just a graduate assistant who's going to do some copy editing for you.
There are ways to think about how you can outsource things, and rely on your partners for that, but it's perfectly okay to say, "I don't know the answer to that question, but let's find out together." I say that all the time to people. So, wrapping up some considerations, and I think that these are really good questions to think through while you're at this beginning stage. The first one is are there differences between your capacity and your organization's capacity? Does your organization expect that you are going to do 12 books a year, and you really don't have capacity for that? Is there not enough funding to meet with the capacity that your organization wants you to have?
Is there not a place to partner within your organization? What do those things look like? Does your capacity point out a particular publishing approach? Are you in a situation where you need to do a more hands-off model, or are you in a position where you can be super hands-on and shepherd a book through each phase of all of the publishing process? What are you prepared to support right now? Then what would you like to grow your program to support maybe later? Maybe right now, you can only support OER adoptions, and that's all you have the ability to do, but in the future, maybe you would like to delve into OER adoptions, where they're still working with a text that they found, but you're making some localized changes.
Maybe you have a three-tiered approach where you're going to start with OER adoptions, and then you're going to do some adaptation work, and then you'll dip your toes in the water of direct OER creation. How can you build that into a plan that you can share with people so that you know that they know that you have already thought of those things? What conversations do you need to have in your organization to better answer these questions? Do you need to pull together an institution wide OER working group to answer these questions before you start a publishing program? Do you need to have conversations within your unit within the library thinking about who needs to be at the table?
That's where that stakeholder's conversation comes in. Could any partnerships help? So, does it make sense for you to partner with your Center for Teaching and Learning or with some instructional designers or with students? Where can you find partnerships that will help? I think that that will really help set you up for success. Then in the following weeks of Pub101, we're going to talk about some different pieces of this in more specifics, but think all of these questions out in the open before you get started, or if you're already starting, and you're just starting to think about these things, how can you integrate them into what you have had to stand up already?
I think that's my last slide, so I can open it up to questions from the group.
Christina: Thank you so much, Amanda. That was wonderful. Every time I hear you talk about being up in the tower...
Amanda: Do I need to find a better story?
Christina: I like to picture you as almost a cartoon character that's smashing that tower down, so I'm glad you're not in the tower.
Amanda: No, I can work from the comfort of my own home way better.
Christina: Nice. I just want to reaffirm to what you were saying about how this course and just going through this class is its own community already that you're a part of. For people that are joining or building for the first time, that's what we're here for, and so it is a great community, and I love that point. Any questions from the group, or thoughts you want to share and maybe get Amanda's perspective on?
Natalia says, "Thanks for posting the slides." There's a lot of good information in them. You are right.
Amanda: I'm always happy to share my slides. Is there interest in me sharing that spreadsheet for collecting licenses for projects? Because if so, I could... Oh, got some very strong yeses. I will definitely put that in the class notes.
Christina: Excellent.
Amanda: Very strong yeses. I will 100% put that in the class notes. I had meant to put it into my slides, and I forgot to link it there, but I find it's very helpful. That's one of the things... That particular thing was one of the things that I built that out of necessity, because I had an instructor who we did our kickoff. We had a lovely... I did create a commons license training with them there. We had conversations about why it was important that they didn't use copyrighted material in their books, and what that meant, and had a conversation around fair use. We did all of it, and they still turned around and handed me a book full of copyrighted images.
I was like, "Well, we can't have that continue to happen," because that was a lot on my plate to go through and be flagging images like, "This one is copyrighted. Do you need it? Is it decorative? What could you replace it with?" So, I had them start logging the images that they were going to use, and what licenses they came from.
Christina: Nice. It looks like Sarah has a question.
Amanda: Oh, Sarah. Sarah asks if there's any project management courses, professional development experiences to recommend like the nitty-gritty mechanics of being a project manager generally. I will say I haven't done any personally, so I can't recommend anything. Everything I have learned has been through my own experience and reaching out to people who have mentored me. I will say one of the things that I do seriously encourage you to reach out. If you're starting a program, and you see somebody's program that you really like, reach out to them, and ask them if you can have a Zoom chat for a consultation for an hour, and talk about their program.
Because I will tell you that the Affordable Learning Exchange is just a rip off of Affordable Learning Georgia, and I also, when I was at Penn State, talked to Jeff who runs Affordable Learning Georgia, Jeff Gallant. We are all more than willing to share the secret sauce with you about what worked and what didn't. You'll learn a lot from iterating. What I would say my advice would be about the gritty mechanics of being a project manager would be make yourself templates for the emails you're going to send. That goes even for check-ins. If you could template that work so that it takes a little bit less of the mechanics out of it for yourself, that would be really helpful.
Everybody's institutional context is so different that it's really hard to give specific advice, but figure out what your process is. I highly recommend that if you're working in a TV people, you do debriefs to talk about how that process is working and what needs changed, what places didn't do what you thought it was going to do. Did something come up that you didn't expect that you would have to support, and what could support for that look like? It's a lot of constant iteration. The first time we did grants at Penn State, it was a free for all. We didn't even have a set amount of what we would award people for grants. It was all over the place.
Some people got $5,000. Some people got $2,500. It was just absolutely a mess to keep track of. It was a mess to budget. We're like, "Well, we can't do that again. That was really silly that we did that." Also, we asked people after that first time to come in and have a consultation with us before they started their grant program... I'm sorry, before they sent in their grant application so that we could get a sense of if they had a viable project ahead of time, and if they didn't, how we could steer them into having a more successful proposal. We had a pretty high acceptance rate. We would probably get between, I would say, 30 and 40 applications.
The first year, we did 10 of probably 30 applications, so that's a one-third acceptance rate. There were lots that we would've liked to take, but they didn't meet the application criteria just because they didn't fill out the form correctly, and they didn't provide the details that were necessary, which makes it easy to say, "No thank you," but we wanted them to be more successful. If they weren't a good fit for the grant program, we could steer them elsewhere for other support for their project. There'll be things that you'll change as your program grows. Keep your documentation tidy. That would be general project management stuff.
If you have timelines, it helps to map them out with a gap chart or with project management software. Depending on what kind of institution you're in, you could use... Teams has a really great... Teams, Microsoft has a really great planner tool that you can use to keep track of projects. There's also tools like Asana and Monday and Trello, which are all great for a project management. I used Asana when I was at Penn State. At Ohio State, we use a spreadsheet, not my favorite solution, but I'm not in charge, so I don't get to say what we do. I'm sorry that I don't have a more specific answer for you, Sarah. If you find one, let me know.
Christina: I think the great answer that you gave was if you see another program, that you reach out to them and ask. It's a good community of sharing and helping and then templating what you do. I have a lot of email templates that I've created over the years that are so time saving, and it seemed like a silly thing to not just write a new email each time, but it's really helpful.
Amanda: If you have a grant call, and you have 30 applicants, and you need to reject more than half of those, an email template will save your life. Even if you customize it with like, "Oh, this isn't a great fit for our program, but we would really like you to talk to the bookstore or the academic press. They might be a great fit for your book, your book idea." Even just having the rest of that information templated is really helpful. The other thing I was going to say is I mean it when I say that you can reach out to me. I have absolutely no problem, and Sarah can vouch for this. I have no problem talking to you about your program, and helping you think through what the situation is.
You are always welcome to book a consultation with me. I will actually put that link in the chat as soon as it loads. I'll also put it in the class notes. If you just want to come and chat about your program, I'm always happy to do that. My calendar's also up to date, so please don't hesitate to throw time on there if you want to chat about your program. Sarah ripped her program apart after our conversation. I'm glad that it's working out better that you feel like it's better. That's good, but thank you very much for coming today. I enjoyed sharing this knowledge with you all. I can't wait to see you all again next week.
Christina: Well, thank you for your time, Amanda. All that you shared with us, that's really helpful. I just want to make a quick note that there is some homework from this week about modifying call for proposals templates. So, you'll see that in the class notes. That's the template that you can take and modify if you'd like. If there's no more questions, thank you all for being here today. Appreciate your time, and we'll see you next week.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This April 27, 2023, session is the fourth in our series this year. Host Christina Trunnell of Montana State University Library is joined by guest speaker Amanda Larson of The Ohio State University for a discussion of publishing models.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
Christina Trunnell (Assistant Dean, Montana State University Library)
Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, The Ohio State University)
Christina: All right, well, welcome everyone today. My name's Christina Trunnell. I am one of your Pub101 curriculum committee members. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's session with the amazing Amanda Larson. Just a couple of things as we get started, I'm going to share the Pub101 class notes, where you'll see transcripts from each session, and links to all of the relevant materials. I also want to remind you all that we adhere to the OEN's community norms, which you can see on our OEN Community Hub, which is a great resource. I will be monitoring the chat as we go through today's session. If you have questions, please feel free to put those in, and we'll make sure that those get covered today.
So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Amanda Larson, who joins us as the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at the Idaho. Goodness, I gave you a completely wrong location. Ohio State University, where she creates professional development opportunities for staff, librarians, and instructors around open pedagogy and open educational practices. Amanda's also the co-chair of our Pub101 curriculum committee, and was an incredible driving force and leader in creating the curriculum that you are going through this course with today. So thank you, Amanda.
Amanda: That was extremely kind. You moved me across the country and back. I'm so excited. It was such a good trip. All right, let me share my screen, and then we'll get started. I am here to talk to you today about publishing program capacity. Let me turn you back into a gallery view, so I can see folks. Then I'm going to go ahead and drop the link to the slides in the chat. If you want to follow along or download any of the...click any of the links. You should be able to do so. All right, let's get started. I am Amanda Larson. I have a long trajectory in this environment of publishing. When I got my first master's degree in literature, I was the editorial assistant at the Journal of Narrative Theory.
There, I started getting questions from authors around their copyrights and their rights as authors, and would they be able to put their work inside institutional repositories. It was the first time that I was exposed to the idea of open publishing in the sense of it being connected to academic work and instructional materials. Up until that point, I was totally in the open source software arena of thinking about open content. Then I got my library degree at UW Madison, and I was able to get a teaching assistantship there as the open educational resources teaching assistant. In that role, things were very grassroots at UW Madison, and I was able to work with a really, really intensely engaged group of passionate advocates for making their materials openly licensed.
What I provided for them were Pressbooks training, doing troubleshooting Pressbooks for them, helping them think through the pedagogical implications of using OER in their classroom. Then after I graduated, I was the open education librarian at Penn State, where I co-ran the affordable course transformation grant program. We built that from the ground up. We started it and iterated on it over the two and a half years that I was there. Then I moved to Ohio State where I work as the affordable learning instructional consultant, and I do a grant project support for the Affordable Learning Exchange.
My work right now really centers around curation of resources for instructors, and also thinking about racial equity. I support the racial justice grants, which I'll talk about a little bit later, and also open pedagogy. So once you have open content, how do you teach with it? I like to provide an agenda. We're going to talk about why you might want a publishing program. We're going to talk about how you might develop that publishing program, thinking about a couple different institutional contexts that you might do that in. We're going to think through about who's doing the work, and think about that in the idea of capacity building.
We're going to talk about a couple building definitions and then communication training and then community building. So, how do you build a community at your institution? What do you want to think through in that? Then importantly, self-care and then some considerations for doing this kind of work. I think that if you are at the very beginning of your program building, it's really important to think through the why of what you're doing. So, understanding why you're doing this will help you think through what your program needs, and it all can build on top of that question of why. Lots of different institutions have lots of different why's, so it could be that that was handed down to you as a mandate from admin at your institution.
It could be that there's an underlying need that you're responding to. It could be part of a larger initiative on campus. It might support your goals for outreach. Then you might also want to think about how people would be participating as part of that why, and why you would pick adoption, adaptation or authoring at your institution. And is part of the why that it is part of your outreach strategy. Thinking through why for your program will help you decide probably about the what and the how going forward.
So thinking about some different scenarios that you might have for starting a program. It could be that there is pressure from student government to help make textbooks more affordable, or to do course markings. They're really focusing on the cost, so helping them be better able to afford that. And so you might partner with student government to start a publishing program or an OER program, or it could be that you have a top-down mandate from administration. Admin is super interested in OER, and they want a program to happen, and so now you have to spin up a publishing program based around OER. It could be part of a larger initiative of affordability on your campus, and so it could be or a larger initiative focused on open at your campus. So, it could be that you already have done quite a bit of work in the open access arena, and now you are spreading out into open education.
Those are just some ideas of thinking about... It could be a grassroots thing where your faculty are super interested in doing this kind of work, and are early adopters. So, it could also be that. So thinking through the why is where we're going to start off when we think about building a program.
There are two open textbook development approaches that I have identified in lots of conversations with my peers. I do a lot of mentoring for people running programs. What I see most often is either there's this do-it-yourself model where there's one person, or it's a very small team of people, and oftentimes, you might be doing it off the side of your desk in this instance. It might be a duty as assigned in this instance.
Then there's also this publishing program and then larger electronic book publishing services that it might be a part of that. So, they have some commonalities. They're each going to have goals. You're going to need to identify support in both of them. If you're working in a larger publishing program, you're going to want to identify partners pretty early on. In a one-person show model, you're going to want to make sure that you have your expectations defined really clearly. Make sure that you clearly communicate what you can and cannot do, and then you're going to want to probably do a lot of teach the teacher or train the trainer model instruction around publishing for instructors inside your community.
You'll see that some of those things are also in the other ones. You're going to define roles, and you're going to clearly communicate again. They're both going to need you to build a community, and those communities might look different. There's also this idea about self-care that is going to be present in both of those models that we want to encourage you to keep an eye on. I have been doing this for a while, and thinking about starting your program from a place where you're building around your capacity to begin with rather than having to scale back, because your over capacity is a great way to go.
So if you're identifying support, one of the first things you're going to want to think through is what services are you willing you have the capacity to support? So, this could look like working with authors to author new work, so you're going to create brand new OER from scratch. They're not going to have any other content. I've run into this quite a bit, where authors already have a lot of content that they're using in their classes that they have authored, and they just want to turn it into shiny textbook, where that's all co-located in one location.
It could be that they have nothing, and they're really going to go through a whole textbook development process, where they're going to identify what content they want to put in there, and they are going to work on out the structure of what the book looks like, and then provide content. That could be them as solo authors. It could be also them identifying a suite of authors in their discipline, who they want to work with to help do that. It could also be that they are... You might be deciding that you would work with authors to adapt in remix work, so they're going to start with probably an existing OER, and then adapt it within the scope of the license that it has to localize it for their particular context in their classroom.
It could also be working with others to make materials culturally relevant, or to incorporate racial justice curriculum into it. So, this could be that they're going to take an OER that already exists, and then they are going to say, "This book doesn't have enough representation. I want to resource all of the images, and I want to think about diverse naming conventions for examples inside of the book." They're doing that kind of work then, which fits into that localization, but also with an I to equity. Then you're going to want to think through what tools you can offer to your faculty to create and remix works.
This is where I always encourage you to take a look at what already exists at your institution. So, maybe you're a Google school, and you have access to Google Suite. Maybe instead of it turning into a book, it's a Google site, or they're going to do all of their authoring inside of Google Docs, and then maybe it'll go live somewhere else afterwards. It could be that you have a license for Pressbooks or Manifold, or you want to try editing with Scribe, or you want to build your OER inside your learning management system or LMS at your institution. So, what tools can you offer to your faculty to create remix works?
I could even add more ideas to this list now, so PubPub is a great option to think about for content authoring. Then after this is all done, they have created their product. Where does this live? So, is it going to live inside your institutional repository if you have one? Are you publishing it on the OER Commons? Is it getting published on the web, in the LMS? If it's a Pressbook, will you turn it on so that it can be part of the Pressbook directory? Those are all questions to think through as you're starting to think about identifying the support you need. One of the things is after you've decided what kind of topics, what kind of projects you will be supporting, you might want to consider the following questions.
So thinking through, how many projects can you take on to start with? I would always encourage you to start with less rather than more. It's really easy to build in scalability if you start small. It's really hard to back off after you have...say you start with 10 projects. It's really hard to say the next cycle, we're only taking five. It's hard to explain that to admin. Well, you did 10 last year. Why can't you do 10 this year? So thinking about starting, I would even encourage starting with one or two, maybe three projects to begin with, and seeing how it goes. What is the process like?
Because after you have gone through that first cycle, a lot more things about your capacity are going to be clear to you, and you're going to understand how much work it takes, what kind of authors that you are working with, what their needs are. So if you start small, you also want to think about how many you'd want to add to the next cycle to scale your program up. So if you work with three this time, will you do five next time? Then thinking about what you can do to make your program sustainable. So, there are a lot of aging successful programs that are out there who have been doing this for five or six years or 10 years, and have reached this point now of thinking through, "Okay, so we scaled up. We got all of these dollars in cost savings, but now we don't have any funding left. What happens now?"
That's the situation that Ohio State is in is that they had a huge grant, and they did a lot of great work over the last five or six years, and now there is no money left to do grants. Without finding more funding, we have to figure out what that looks like in the future. So thinking at the very beginning of your program like, "What are your sustainability portions in this?" That counts also not just for funding, but also thinking about how are the OER that your instructors are creating? How are those sustainable? Do they have a sustainability plan? What does their edits and revision cycle look like?
When I was running my grant program, I always had folks teach with their materials for a year or at least at the very least a semester to get an idea of, "You created this thing. Now, what's missing? What do you need to add?" Extra credit for students to find typos is also helpful here, but helping them think through how that they're going to continue to use this material again and again in their classroom, and hopefully also helping them build the skills to make those edits themselves if you're in that one-person model, and then thinking through what is your budget like? Do you have a set amount of funds for each year? Where are those funds coming from?
Do those funds fluctuate from year to year? Is the funding soft? Are you able to request any in-kind funding? So if your grant supports up to X many dollars, does their department also kick in X many dollars, or is there a partner that you're collaborating with who also provides in-kind funding to help support the grant program? Thinking about those at the very beginning for how you're going... what you need to support these programs. In the do-it-yourself model, a good question to ask is, "Is this going to be a publishing effort that is supported through administration, or is this a grassroots campaign?"
I have seen this play out in different ways on different campuses. I have done both. At Wisconsin, it was very grassroots. At Penn State, it was very much a publishing program with lots of admin support. Those kinds of programs need different kinds of support and thinking through. Is there cash for OER, especially with COVID having happened and still going on? Trying to figure out how that has changed budgets for places has been something that has been very relevant. Is there still money to do this kind of work? Is it just you supporting all of the OER publishing efforts at your institution, or are there a few collaborators that you can lean on?
Are you working individually, you are the one person who does this work, or is there a small team of you who does this work and has conversations about what this will look like? Thinking about also, how can students participate? Can you get a student worker? Is that something that happens in your contacts pretty regularly? Can you secure a teaching assistantship for a graduate student? What does that look like? If you can do that, then you would want to think through those questions again about how that fits into your support model. Then if you have a publishing program where you have a lot of administrative support, it's really important to identify which administrators are supporting this effort.
So in my case, it was the provost, and so you'll want to think through your institutional context. Does the support come from the top down? So, is it the president of the institution? Is it the provost? Is it the unit, or does the support come from a specific outlying unit? So thinking about maybe if you have a Center for Teaching and Learning, something like that, are they doing this kind of support? At Ohio State, we have the Drake Learning Center, and they do a lot of grant funding for instructors to do professional development, and so OER could be one of those things that they are helping support.
Again, financial, where's the money coming from, again, especially with the way that COVID has changed things at our institutions? Then who's on the team? Who's going to be doing the day-to-day work? Are you the point person who is going to be interacting with all of the authors? Do you have access to production support? Is there somebody who can help put together the books for instructors? Are you collaborating with other librarians at your institution? Are you collaborating across units at your institution? Then what does the work look for each of those people?
That leads us right into talking about partners. Who has a seat at the table? One of the ways that you can think about getting started is by building a working group of stakeholders. I have pulled together here a list of some common partners for this kind of work. It's not by any ways, means, or stretch of the imagination exhaustive, but you could be working with students. You could be working with the libraries if you're not already positioned in the library. You could be working in the Center for Teaching and Learning. That could have a different name at your institution. You could be working definitely with faculty.
What is the role of your bookstore? Do you have an academic press? How do they fit into the conversation? Are there specific academic units who might want to be at the table around this conversation, and then are there institutional specific units? When I was at Penn State, there was another unit in earth sciences who had been building OER for 10 years, and they were working on a repository for OER. So, they really wanted a seat at the table to talk about OER at the institutional context level. So thinking about who can you partner with, and making sure that you at least extend the invitation for them to join in on this kind of work.
Then it's really important to define expectations, and this has multiple levels. Once you've identified what and how you can support your publishing effort, you're going to start defining the expectations around your publishing program. So, what are your expectations for faculty authors? What are they responsible for? Then what support can they expect from you? It's really good to define this ahead of time, and get it in writing. We'll talk about MOUs later, memorandums of understanding, later in the programming for Pub101, but it's great to get this in writing before you launch through that MOU process. But absolutely, it can be iterative and grow with your initiative.
I think what's really important is sitting down with faculty authors, and saying, "You can expect that I am going to do X, Y, Z for you." So in this case, it could be, "I will provide you with tool training. I will give you access to a tool that you can author in, and then I'm happy to look over the content that you put in there afterwards." That could be what they can expect for you. Then you expect them to generate the content, to source their images, and making sure that they're openly licensed. I often share a spreadsheet with faculty that allows them to keep track of everything.
I'm happy to share that in this week's class notes, but it sets it up so there's a column for the title of the place, the website where they found it, like what repository did they find it in? Is it an image that they found at an image gallery? And then what license does the content have so that they're keeping track of that because licenses need to be compatible with one another inside, or they need to be called out specifically if they're not compatible. I get them to track that information, and then I'm happy to review their list to make sure everything is compatible or if we need to make that extra call out.
So, thinking about, what are you willing to do, and what do you expect them to do in your publishing program? Which leads into talking about defining roles, so who's going to do what? This is not only your faculty instructors, but also if you're working with people across unit lines or inside the library, where does it make sense to collaborate? Do you have access to instructional designers at your institution who could help faculty create learning objectives and goals for the materials? Could they help them create maybe the template for what the textbook will look like? Can they help them scaffold that content so students are getting all of the support that they need to learn the concepts?
Then also, do you have other librarians who could help faculty curate OER? We do syllabus review grants at Ohio State, and I connect instructors to subject liaisons, and they help them find OER materials that they could use to help drive down the cost. So, they could also help faculty curate OER to remix in this instance if you're working on building out textbooks. Then maybe you also could partner with students who could advocate with the administration for your initiative. At every institution I have been at, admin listens to student voices more than they're listening to mine as a staff person. So, getting the attention of student government is also very helpful to think about how you can leverage that for your initiative.
Then also, the relationship with the bookstore differs from campus to campus, from institution to institution, so maybe you are in the position where the bookstore can help you identify courses, or provide print copies of OER at cost. So, thinking about whether you have a relationship with the bookstore that would be conducive to that, or if you have a hostile bookstore that is going to be like, "No, we don't want any part of that. We are doing our own thing. We're going to make everybody do inclusive access." Those relationships can vary from institution to institution, so it's really important to figure out whether they could be a partner or not, and then also making sure that you have set pretty clear expectations about what all these different partners are doing in the publishing program.
This cannot be stated enough. Most of your work as a project manager doing this work, and thinking about your publishing program is going to be about clearly communicating with all the stakeholders in your publishing initiative. So, this is my recommendation. You may take or leave it. I would suggest adopting an ethos of transparency. You're going to tell it how it is. It's going to be transparent, and you're going to be very clear about expectations. I think it really helps to start off that way. I think it's also really important if you're pulling together a team of people to create shared language early, if not, before you start the publishing program.
What I mean by that is, are you going to call it open educational resources? Are you going to call this an affordability initiative? What resonates more and will have more impact as you advocate at your institution? We spent at Penn State almost the entire time I was there coming up with a Penn State definition of what OER was going to be at Penn State, and what it would include and what it wouldn't include based on the affordability spectrum that we were working with there. So, figuring out what that shared language is going to be is really useful. At Ohio State, that conversation has looked about whether we're calling it curricular resources or if they're going to call it OER, or if we're going to call it affordable resources course materials, and trying to figure out what of those terms would resonate with faculty actually if we were having conversations.
Create a memorandum of understanding, an MOU, for authors that clearly details what they're agreeing to do, and articulates what you will do to support them. This is very helpful particularly if you have folks who are like, "I'm not going to make the timeline." That will happen a lot probably, and making sure that you're communicating regularly with stakeholders and also regularly with authors. Some authors will need more checking in with than others. They fall into different types. There's the people who are going to want you to hold their hand the whole time. There are people who are going to be pretty independent, and then there are going to be people who need just occasional check-ins to keep them on track, and make sure that they're still reaching towards their goals and the timeline that they set.
If you're in that do-it-yourself model, if you're going to want to heavily lean on the teach the teacher model, or train the trainer if you've heard it that way, and you want to teach your authors to be self-sufficient and self-starters. So, you might be providing training for tools. What are they publishing in? I've done a lot of Pressbooks training. I have done some Manifold training for an open journal, and we considered that for open textbooks when I was at Penn State. You'll probably be providing training around open licensing. So, what are the licenses that they can choose? How does this affect their intellectual property?
What are their intellectual property rights at your institution? It's a really good idea to take a look at the IP policy at your institution to see who owns what. For example, faculty at my institution own their copyright, but I do not as a staff member. So, everything I create has to... The license would have to be determined by the university, whether I could openly license it or not. If you think about the different categories of instructors, that might vary for them as well. So, adjuncts might have different IP rights than faculty who are on a tenure track. Then you might also want to provide training around open pedagogy.
How are they going to teach with those materials? Usually, I would say that's one of those things that you would scale up to. First, you would get some people who would make some OER, and then you would have that conversation around open pedagogy and how to teach with it. You can offer support for follow-up questions, but basically, you want to do as much upfront training to get them to be self-sufficient so that they can go off and build their book, and then come back to you. Then what those check-ins look like then is up to you. Sometimes, there would be monthly check-ins to see how they're doing, what kind of support they need.
Do you need to refer them to somebody else? So, we do a lot of referral to copyright services here at Ohio State, so thinking through those things of what you would want to provide training for, particularly if you're in that do-it-yourself model where you're going to have to be a little less hands-on in supporting the actual projects as they grow. Then I would recommend building a community. You want to start small and support only as many projects as you have capacity for over time. One way that you could do that would be to start a community of practice. So, you would introduce your authors to each other, have them share their projects, invite them to discuss what's working and what they're struggling with.
Enable them to not feel alone in the process of creating OER like that kitten says, "It's dangerous to go alone." Take this cute adorable kitten with you, because they often are going to have questions about like, "Oh, I'm trying to make this table inside Pressbooks, and I haven't really found that I've been able to do that in a way that I feel is super accessible." They can have conversations around what's working inside of the tool that you've picked, and what they're struggling with. They'll be able to help each other too, which I have also found is really useful. They can say, "Oh, I troubleshooted that by doing X, Y, Z. Here, let me show you how to do that."
So, helping them have a community of people who are doing the same thing that they're doing is really beneficial to growing your community of practice. At Wisconsin, I was in charge of facilitating the user community for Pressbooks. We started off with some Pressbooks trainings, so they would come and they would learn. We did a Pressbooks101, and then we did a Pressbooks102. The first one is like, "Here's the basic nuts and bolts of how you can use Pressbooks to author in." Then in Pressbooks102, we talked about some of the built-in tools, so hypothesis for social annotation, and H5P for some formative assessments that are interactive.
Then after that, we invited them to come share their projects, and talk about how they were using Pressbooks in their courses to build with. It got to the point where their content was what was sustaining the community of practice. They were coming to talk to each other, and we were just facilitating a time, a place, and providing any answers to questions that cropped up during those conversations, or pointing them to more resources about something they were really excited about. They can become a really great tool to leverage in your publishing program. They'll also help bring people to who they'll share their experience and say, "Oh, I had an awesome times working with Amanda. You should solely talk to her about your course in creating an OER."
The word of mouth there also could help build your program up. I want to talk about self-care and the fact that we live in a capitalistic hellscape. There's just no escaping that. Then inside of that, we also work inside academia, which is rife with its own problems. When you're doing this kind of work, there is a ton of isolation. You're usually the only person doing this. You're doing a lot of emotional labor both for the instructors that you're working with by helping them, but also, you do a lot of emotional labor when you're advocating up the chain to admin, and so thinking about the toll that that might take on you.
You also have to have really tough conversations. There's always that one instructor who wants to put some copyrighted something inside of their textbook. I've had people who wanted to put what would be extremely expensive music to license inside their book, or images that are just not ever going to be obtainable in an institutional context, and having really tough conversations with them about that. Also, tough conversations with your colleagues around the work that you do and also around... It can be tough to have those conversations where you are in a position, and you have to go and advocate for your program with admin. There can be some really tough conversations in that area.
So, it's really important to think through the self-care you might need after those conversations. Then also, some people are very resistant to learning new technologies. That might even be you yourself, and just acknowledging that that is a thing, and that that might be something you have to work around. If it is you, if you are that person who's like, "I don't want to learn another technology. I just had to learn Teams last week, because our institution switched to it," I feel you. I'm so fatigued with the amount of changes that we've had with technology over the past two years.
Just set yourself up to succeed in having those conversations around technology, and give yourself enough time to learn the tool that you might be supporting before you have to showcase it to everybody. The image on this one is a tower. I picked that because when I worked at Penn State, I literally worked in the tower. I was by myself most of the time all by myself on the third floor in a tower that had an elevator that you could only access with a key that was 100 years old, and was super scary to ride up. There were jokes about, "Oh, Amanda's Rapunzel. She's always up in that tower working." It can be literal isolation as well as just work isolation.
So, it doesn't have to be hopeless though. The one thing I want you to realize right now is that you are building a network while you are right here. All of the people in this call with you are a network that you can use. We are going through this together. You're building a community right now, and it really helps to think about starting your publishing program, and making time to build a network around open publishing to really help stifle some of that isolation. Looking for places where you can engage in conversation with other people who are doing this kind of work, particularly when you're in that startup phase, please don't hesitate to reach out people who have much for programs.
More than likely, we are more than happy to chat with you about what worked and what didn't work. I would also say that if you are in a position to where you can set boundaries, that is very helpful. It could be that you just don't answer email on the weekends, or there are boundaries around what you're willing to help with and what you can't help with, and be firm in those boundaries if you are able to. I recognized that not all of us are in places and institutions where we can do that, and that's often very sad to me. Then also for those tough questions, you can pre-plan answers. You know that there's always going to be a curmudgeonly old faculty member who is like, "I heard that OER quality is awful."
It helps to pre-plan answers to those questions so that you aren't lost in the anxiety of somebody asking you a hard question, but also that you are like, "No, actually, there's research that says OER quality is about the same if not better than traditional textbooks." There are errors in traditional textbooks all the time. The benefit of OER is that you can fix those errors immediately if you really wanted to in your localized copy. So, I would advocate for having pre-planned answers. I would say that also goes for questions that admin would have for you, so thinking about what data you're collecting. Admin are going to want cost-saving numbers.
They're going to want to know how many courses you transformed, and making sure that you're collecting that kind of data ahead of time so that you can answer those questions when they crop up is really helpful. Also, you don't have to be the master of everything. That's why it's really important to do this beginning work where you're setting up your program, and you're deciding what you do have the capacity and the ability to do, but maybe you don't have the ability to copy edit, but your grant funding does have a little bit of extra money where you could hire a copy editor, even if it's just a graduate assistant who's going to do some copy editing for you.
There are ways to think about how you can outsource things, and rely on your partners for that, but it's perfectly okay to say, "I don't know the answer to that question, but let's find out together." I say that all the time to people. So, wrapping up some considerations, and I think that these are really good questions to think through while you're at this beginning stage. The first one is are there differences between your capacity and your organization's capacity? Does your organization expect that you are going to do 12 books a year, and you really don't have capacity for that? Is there not enough funding to meet with the capacity that your organization wants you to have?
Is there not a place to partner within your organization? What do those things look like? Does your capacity point out a particular publishing approach? Are you in a situation where you need to do a more hands-off model, or are you in a position where you can be super hands-on and shepherd a book through each phase of all of the publishing process? What are you prepared to support right now? Then what would you like to grow your program to support maybe later? Maybe right now, you can only support OER adoptions, and that's all you have the ability to do, but in the future, maybe you would like to delve into OER adoptions, where they're still working with a text that they found, but you're making some localized changes.
Maybe you have a three-tiered approach where you're going to start with OER adoptions, and then you're going to do some adaptation work, and then you'll dip your toes in the water of direct OER creation. How can you build that into a plan that you can share with people so that you know that they know that you have already thought of those things? What conversations do you need to have in your organization to better answer these questions? Do you need to pull together an institution wide OER working group to answer these questions before you start a publishing program? Do you need to have conversations within your unit within the library thinking about who needs to be at the table?
That's where that stakeholder's conversation comes in. Could any partnerships help? So, does it make sense for you to partner with your Center for Teaching and Learning or with some instructional designers or with students? Where can you find partnerships that will help? I think that that will really help set you up for success. Then in the following weeks of Pub101, we're going to talk about some different pieces of this in more specifics, but think all of these questions out in the open before you get started, or if you're already starting, and you're just starting to think about these things, how can you integrate them into what you have had to stand up already?
I think that's my last slide, so I can open it up to questions from the group.
Christina: Thank you so much, Amanda. That was wonderful. Every time I hear you talk about being up in the tower...
Amanda: Do I need to find a better story?
Christina: I like to picture you as almost a cartoon character that's smashing that tower down, so I'm glad you're not in the tower.
Amanda: No, I can work from the comfort of my own home way better.
Christina: Nice. I just want to reaffirm to what you were saying about how this course and just going through this class is its own community already that you're a part of. For people that are joining or building for the first time, that's what we're here for, and so it is a great community, and I love that point. Any questions from the group, or thoughts you want to share and maybe get Amanda's perspective on?
Natalia says, "Thanks for posting the slides." There's a lot of good information in them. You are right.
Amanda: I'm always happy to share my slides. Is there interest in me sharing that spreadsheet for collecting licenses for projects? Because if so, I could... Oh, got some very strong yeses. I will definitely put that in the class notes.
Christina: Excellent.
Amanda: Very strong yeses. I will 100% put that in the class notes. I had meant to put it into my slides, and I forgot to link it there, but I find it's very helpful. That's one of the things... That particular thing was one of the things that I built that out of necessity, because I had an instructor who we did our kickoff. We had a lovely... I did create a commons license training with them there. We had conversations about why it was important that they didn't use copyrighted material in their books, and what that meant, and had a conversation around fair use. We did all of it, and they still turned around and handed me a book full of copyrighted images.
I was like, "Well, we can't have that continue to happen," because that was a lot on my plate to go through and be flagging images like, "This one is copyrighted. Do you need it? Is it decorative? What could you replace it with?" So, I had them start logging the images that they were going to use, and what licenses they came from.
Christina: Nice. It looks like Sarah has a question.
Amanda: Oh, Sarah. Sarah asks if there's any project management courses, professional development experiences to recommend like the nitty-gritty mechanics of being a project manager generally. I will say I haven't done any personally, so I can't recommend anything. Everything I have learned has been through my own experience and reaching out to people who have mentored me. I will say one of the things that I do seriously encourage you to reach out. If you're starting a program, and you see somebody's program that you really like, reach out to them, and ask them if you can have a Zoom chat for a consultation for an hour, and talk about their program.
Because I will tell you that the Affordable Learning Exchange is just a rip off of Affordable Learning Georgia, and I also, when I was at Penn State, talked to Jeff who runs Affordable Learning Georgia, Jeff Gallant. We are all more than willing to share the secret sauce with you about what worked and what didn't. You'll learn a lot from iterating. What I would say my advice would be about the gritty mechanics of being a project manager would be make yourself templates for the emails you're going to send. That goes even for check-ins. If you could template that work so that it takes a little bit less of the mechanics out of it for yourself, that would be really helpful.
Everybody's institutional context is so different that it's really hard to give specific advice, but figure out what your process is. I highly recommend that if you're working in a TV people, you do debriefs to talk about how that process is working and what needs changed, what places didn't do what you thought it was going to do. Did something come up that you didn't expect that you would have to support, and what could support for that look like? It's a lot of constant iteration. The first time we did grants at Penn State, it was a free for all. We didn't even have a set amount of what we would award people for grants. It was all over the place.
Some people got $5,000. Some people got $2,500. It was just absolutely a mess to keep track of. It was a mess to budget. We're like, "Well, we can't do that again. That was really silly that we did that." Also, we asked people after that first time to come in and have a consultation with us before they started their grant program... I'm sorry, before they sent in their grant application so that we could get a sense of if they had a viable project ahead of time, and if they didn't, how we could steer them into having a more successful proposal. We had a pretty high acceptance rate. We would probably get between, I would say, 30 and 40 applications.
The first year, we did 10 of probably 30 applications, so that's a one-third acceptance rate. There were lots that we would've liked to take, but they didn't meet the application criteria just because they didn't fill out the form correctly, and they didn't provide the details that were necessary, which makes it easy to say, "No thank you," but we wanted them to be more successful. If they weren't a good fit for the grant program, we could steer them elsewhere for other support for their project. There'll be things that you'll change as your program grows. Keep your documentation tidy. That would be general project management stuff.
If you have timelines, it helps to map them out with a gap chart or with project management software. Depending on what kind of institution you're in, you could use... Teams has a really great... Teams, Microsoft has a really great planner tool that you can use to keep track of projects. There's also tools like Asana and Monday and Trello, which are all great for a project management. I used Asana when I was at Penn State. At Ohio State, we use a spreadsheet, not my favorite solution, but I'm not in charge, so I don't get to say what we do. I'm sorry that I don't have a more specific answer for you, Sarah. If you find one, let me know.
Christina: I think the great answer that you gave was if you see another program, that you reach out to them and ask. It's a good community of sharing and helping and then templating what you do. I have a lot of email templates that I've created over the years that are so time saving, and it seemed like a silly thing to not just write a new email each time, but it's really helpful.
Amanda: If you have a grant call, and you have 30 applicants, and you need to reject more than half of those, an email template will save your life. Even if you customize it with like, "Oh, this isn't a great fit for our program, but we would really like you to talk to the bookstore or the academic press. They might be a great fit for your book, your book idea." Even just having the rest of that information templated is really helpful. The other thing I was going to say is I mean it when I say that you can reach out to me. I have absolutely no problem, and Sarah can vouch for this. I have no problem talking to you about your program, and helping you think through what the situation is.
You are always welcome to book a consultation with me. I will actually put that link in the chat as soon as it loads. I'll also put it in the class notes. If you just want to come and chat about your program, I'm always happy to do that. My calendar's also up to date, so please don't hesitate to throw time on there if you want to chat about your program. Sarah ripped her program apart after our conversation. I'm glad that it's working out better that you feel like it's better. That's good, but thank you very much for coming today. I enjoyed sharing this knowledge with you all. I can't wait to see you all again next week.
Christina: Well, thank you for your time, Amanda. All that you shared with us, that's really helpful. I just want to make a quick note that there is some homework from this week about modifying call for proposals templates. So, you'll see that in the class notes. That's the template that you can take and modify if you'd like. If there's no more questions, thank you all for being here today. Appreciate your time, and we'll see you next week.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:17:26 Michael Porterfield: Hello, is there a recording from the last session? I had to miss it but would like to watch it, thanks
00:17:58 Michael Porterfield: Thanks. Forgot
00:18:06 Karen Lauritsen: It’s linked from the orientation document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit
00:18:44 Christina Trunnell: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.fnce4sm0hutt
00:20:38 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ePw2Oqb0s6QVS3s6acY_7Cl9NhTP7rc4x7VfMSrNwW4/edit?usp=sharing
00:24:29 Susan Hoover: @Christina, I just noticed that's the 2022 class notes. 2023 are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:25:41 Susan Hoover: I was confused because I didn't see my name at the top and I was sure I had put something there. :)
00:25:44 Christina Trunnell: Oh my. Thanks, Susan!
00:54:46 Karen Lauritsen: ☹️
00:59:49 Susan Hoover: These questions are great for any project!
01:02:48 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks for posting the slides. There is so much great stuff here for me to share with our team here.
01:03:21 Natalia Bowdoin: Yes!!
01:03:21 Lucas Hall: yes!
01:03:29 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you!
01:03:35 Lucas Hall: thank you :)
01:04:08 Sarah Hare: Project management seems like such a big part of all of this. Do you have any project management courses/ professional development experiences to recommend? Like the nitty gritty mechanics of being a project manager generally
01:04:55 Sarah Hare: lol
01:09:50 Sarah Hare: Thanks, Amanda! It's just a skill that I know I need to hone 🙂
01:10:08 Colleen Deel: Replying to "lol"
I attended this useful library project management webinar series a year back. I don't think they've done it again (that I know of) but the helpful PPTs are still available here: https://minitex.umn.edu/news/2022-05/project-management-libraries-webinar-series-announced
01:10:25 Karen Lauritsen: More on program management is in Unit 3:
01:10:29 Karen Lauritsen: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/unit-3-overview-learning-goals-and-glossary?module_item_id=9770876
01:11:12 Amanda Larson: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/UniversityLibraries1@buckeyemail.osu.edu/bookings/
01:11:13 Sarah Hare: A note that I ripped our program apart last summer because of Amanda's advice and it is SO much better.
01:11:20 Michael Porterfield: We always like the secret sauce
01:11:30 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "We always like the s..." with 😁
01:11:55 Beth South: Thank you!
01:11:56 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you so much!!!
01:12:01 Elizabeth Goodman: Thank you!
01:12:01 Elizabeth Howard: thank you
01:12:02 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
01:12:12 Christina Trunnell: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wfeG7OkuEVWoXg7743mt8eAeKWBa-wWD2CVWq4B1STg/edit
01:12:16 Sharon Moore: Really good info! Thanks!
00:17:58 Michael Porterfield: Thanks. Forgot
00:18:06 Karen Lauritsen: It’s linked from the orientation document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit
00:18:44 Christina Trunnell: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.fnce4sm0hutt
00:20:38 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ePw2Oqb0s6QVS3s6acY_7Cl9NhTP7rc4x7VfMSrNwW4/edit?usp=sharing
00:24:29 Susan Hoover: @Christina, I just noticed that's the 2022 class notes. 2023 are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:25:41 Susan Hoover: I was confused because I didn't see my name at the top and I was sure I had put something there. :)
00:25:44 Christina Trunnell: Oh my. Thanks, Susan!
00:54:46 Karen Lauritsen: ☹️
00:59:49 Susan Hoover: These questions are great for any project!
01:02:48 Natalia Bowdoin: Thanks for posting the slides. There is so much great stuff here for me to share with our team here.
01:03:21 Natalia Bowdoin: Yes!!
01:03:21 Lucas Hall: yes!
01:03:29 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you!
01:03:35 Lucas Hall: thank you :)
01:04:08 Sarah Hare: Project management seems like such a big part of all of this. Do you have any project management courses/ professional development experiences to recommend? Like the nitty gritty mechanics of being a project manager generally
01:04:55 Sarah Hare: lol
01:09:50 Sarah Hare: Thanks, Amanda! It's just a skill that I know I need to hone 🙂
01:10:08 Colleen Deel: Replying to "lol"
I attended this useful library project management webinar series a year back. I don't think they've done it again (that I know of) but the helpful PPTs are still available here: https://minitex.umn.edu/news/2022-05/project-management-libraries-webinar-series-announced
01:10:25 Karen Lauritsen: More on program management is in Unit 3:
01:10:29 Karen Lauritsen: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/unit-3-overview-learning-goals-and-glossary?module_item_id=9770876
01:11:12 Amanda Larson: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/UniversityLibraries1@buckeyemail.osu.edu/bookings/
01:11:13 Sarah Hare: A note that I ripped our program apart last summer because of Amanda's advice and it is SO much better.
01:11:20 Michael Porterfield: We always like the secret sauce
01:11:30 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "We always like the s..." with 😁
01:11:55 Beth South: Thank you!
01:11:56 Natalia Bowdoin: Thank you so much!!!
01:12:01 Elizabeth Goodman: Thank you!
01:12:01 Elizabeth Howard: thank you
01:12:02 Tammy Palmier: Thank you!
01:12:12 Christina Trunnell: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wfeG7OkuEVWoXg7743mt8eAeKWBa-wWD2CVWq4B1STg/edit
01:12:16 Sharon Moore: Really good info! Thanks!
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