The Common Lighting Stream, the MD-Walk, the Anthropocene is now, it is our age in which we humans have become the dominant geological factor. It is an age with several different, maybe independent environmental crises, and Theodore is an PhD microbiologist and computer scientist, and will take a closer look for us and pick all these crises apart for us. Are these crises actually tied together? How much impact does each of those crises have? What do some of the solutions look like, and which of those have no solution? So without further ado, these of those crises are just problematic, only catastrophic, and which are just apocalyptic. Hi everybody, good to have you. I'm Theo, and I'm pre-recording this talk from Arbok, where I'm doing my PhD as a bioinformatician, and I'm working on the ecology of microbes in lakes. As I'm pre-recording this, I'm really looking forward to the conference that we're having right now, when you're watching this, or that we had when you're watching this after the fact. I'm really looking forward to the conference, and I really want to thank the organisers for putting together something under this banner, where we can talk about all the problems we are facing with the environmental crisis. So if you see any jump cuts here, that's because I cut out some of the errors I made during the recording of it. My talk will be about problems and solving problems, but not really in the way that you might think about, and you might be disappointed when you think that I'm really giving you some solutions. It will be not really scientific as in hard science, natural science, and it will not be really political in a sense of what can we do politically, but it still will be both of them.  So to start, let me tell you that when I started to study, I studied biology, and only after quite a while, I started to get into contact with computer science and programmers. And I was very interested, it was really strange, to see how programmers talk about problems a little bit differently. So I think that regular people, they think about problems as something that you can just solve, and then it's gone, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. But programmers, I found, when you bring them a problem, and I think I'm talking about algorithmic people here, they don't really think, okay, now how can we solve this? What's the answer to the problem that you posed to me? But they rather think, can we solve this in limited time? Is this binomial? So the question is, rather, you give me a problem, can I give you an answer for every possible set of inputs in reasonable time? And then they go through it, they formalize the problem, they maybe simplified in some places, they find bugs in their thinking or in their code, and they might sometimes be surprised. So the nicest pieces of algorithms are full of interesting surprises. And then maybe they start to work on something that regular people would call a solution, but sometimes it's fun enough to be theoretically possible to solve the problem. And then solving problems always meant something different. So when you solve problems for programmers, again, I overgeneralize, it's like chess. You know that there is a program that is able to play chess better than a human, but still you play chess. Like it's solved, but it's not solved as in solved solved. So maybe let's make that distinction between solved as in chess and solved solved as for regular people. And then there's this other class of problems, which are not solved yet, question mark, and usually programmers solve it by finding a way of mapping parts of problems to solve problems. And this way then the problem is solved. So the main thing for this conference, which I'm very happy that a conference like this happens right now, especially, is that we really have to solve the environmental crisis. And I don't know what the environmental crisis is the right term. It's really hard for me to think about what the right term for this might be. But you know, we have all of these different issues or problems, which come together to one big hole, which for now I would call environmental crisis. So what I suggest for this talk is that we go through some of these details of the environmental crisis and take this idea of solving problems from a programmer's point of view and apply it very aggressively and let's see where it gets us. So as a first example, let's take a climate change and I really don't need to go into any of the details. You know everything about it. I think because it's really a topic that we talk a lot about. And you know also this figure that is the warning stripes that shows you how the medium temperature is rising very strongly in the last few decades. If we think about now what the problem is with climate change, then we might formalize it like this. We need to minimize the delta of temperature, the increase of medium temperature of the whole earth. So there should be no more climate change in terms of temperature. And then we can take this problem and think about it, go to some scientists, ask them, climate scientists for example, ask them what they can say about it. And they will say, look, we have all of these models, we have all of this data. We can easily tell you that at the core of the problem there is CO2 and equivalence of CO2. So that's CO2E. And then the problem is solved. Of course then the work begins and that's the work that we're in right now as a society or in this conference to figure out how to minimize CO2E. But let's say as a naive scientist, for me this problem is solved and I really don't understand why it's not solved, solved yet. There is a second example that's very close to this and actually something that we have solved, solved more or less and that's the ozone depletion. Here we can formalize it like minimize the reduction of ozone in the ozone layer. And again going to scientists and so on we found out that you have to minimize the emissions of certain chemicals into the atmosphere and that way the ozone depletion was solved, solved again more or less but let's say it's solved, solved. If we now take a third example, let's take species extinctions. So you know that in the last decades more and more species go extinct. And this is getting closer and closer to a level where ecosystems will collapse if we don't do anything about it. There are a lot of problems involved in this and I don't want to go into those details but I want to think about how to formalize this. And again as a starting point we might say okay we need to minimize the number of extinctions to a minimum level, best case zero. No more species should go extinct because of anthropogenic impact. So if you take this and go to scientists with this ecologists and so on they will not be able to give you a good model for that because it's really hard. Ecosystems are complex systems and there is not just one system like the climate system that's one global system but there are many different ecosystems all over the place and it's hard. And it's really no surprise then to see that there are a lot of reasons, different reasons for extinctions that don't overlap. Some of them do and you could go at them but it's not as easy as climate change. So if we encounter a problem like this in programming one of the things we might think about is do we think about the problem the wrong way? Do we need to zoom in maybe? Do we need to zoom out? And the bigger picture is called Anthropocene and as the geological period where humans or humanity or we have changed the face of the earth to such a degree that it's causing significant changes we are approaching a lot of tipping points in all of the environmental systems that are out there. So the Anthropocene has started only around 1950 because that's where we see in all of these variables that are here in these great acceleration graphs a strong increase hockey stick like in many different variables both on a societal side or anthropogenic side as well as in the earth systems. And it really looks like a switch got flipped and all the dynamics are different. And that's what the Anthropocene is in essence is that the earth system has entered into a new dynamic which does not both well actually for us. How can we think about this in the terms that we know before as problems? And when you try to think about what we should minimize in the Anthropocene we will not find something to do. And we can really think a lot about it and many people have done and some of them have come up with good ideas. Some of them have come up with bad ideas. Some of them actually have thought about the Anthropocene as a problem and their solution is to just fly away and live on Mars or something like that. So maybe what we need to do here is to abandon the idea that this is a problem and to think about it differently. So I want to suggest a different class of problem or issue or something. And all of this nomenclature is a little bit problematic. So let's call the other thing that is not a problem a catastrophe. And let's define it like this. So problems on the one hand can be solved and then they go away. That's like problem solution. Everything's fine. And by that they are external. They don't really belong to you in any form of identity. Catastrophies on the other hand, they don't go away. You have to learn to live with this new situation that came about with catastrophe. And in this way they are internal to you in a sense. This leads to something that will come up later that for catastrophes problem solving might be and I would argue is a dark pattern. So by catastrophe I mean something more or less specific. And I cannot really define it more than that. So I will give you some examples and then hopefully you can understand what I mean. So for example, let's say you lose a leg or an arm in any sort of accident. Losing an arm or a leg is not really a problem. You cannot solve it. Of course you can get some sort of mechanical technological replacement, but it will not solve the problem.  You will even with this help, you will have to learn how to live with your new situation. So this is a catastrophe. But catastrophes, the name sounds really apocalyptic. So another example would be maybe falling in love and like the big way of not being able to sleep, not being able to eat and so on. Something that really changes everything and it does not go away easily. In some movies, you know, there are these situations where a character comes up and says, you know, I have fallen in love. What can I do? And the other person says, yeah, just wait, it will go away. But this is not how to handle love. It is not a problem. It cannot be solved. It is a catastrophe. You have to learn to live with this change. But it's of course not apocalyptic and falling in love not always means the end of the world. Maybe if we want to have a motto of how to cope with catastrophes, it is this title of a Donna Haraway book, staying with the trouble, not run away with it, stay with the trouble, live with the trouble, accept the trouble as a new form of identity, maybe. Sadly, the book is not really about this. It is not a bad book, but it's really not about this. But I really like the title and I had to include it here. So as I said, I think problems might be a dark pattern and we tend to focus on problems instead of catastrophes. So for example, in the political discourse, we're talking a lot about climate change. We're not talking too much about either species extinctions, which we are talking about, but still not that much. And we're really not talking enough about the Anthropocene. So why is that the case? And I have two ideas that I want to present to you and you can disagree with me and you can come up with your own ideas. But I think there is something here why problems are so attractive to us. And I think one is narratives. So for example, in Godzilla films, and I think they're really a good example here, you have a problem and that is a monster arrives, either Godzilla or some other kaiju that just shows up and destroys everything. And this is a problem and solving the problem is to make this go away or wait until it goes away or support the right kaiju so that all of them go away. And then the problem is solved. However, in all of these movies, there are countless catastrophes. People lose their homes. People lose their loved ones. But the movie is not about them and the movie cannot be about them because the movie has to end and by the end of the movie, the problem has to be solved. That's one of the most unrealistic things about movies in general. They end. The real life does not really end with the end of the problem, but a movie does end right after the problem is solved. So maybe we should think about how to have narratives that don't end when the problem is solved. And I know that, for example, in old scripture and so on, there are many narratives that just don't end when the problem is solved, but these narratives stick with you and you take them with you in your life. Maybe this is one of the reasons why we like problems so much because they make really entertaining narratives. But I think there's a second reason and that is with problems, you can sell stuff that solves the problems. So solutions as a service, coding solutions, whatever solutions. If someone has a problem, you can sell them an app that will solve their problem or you can try and sell them, I don't know, blockchain that will solve their pandemic or something like that. As long as someone has a problem, you can sell them stuff that will solve that. It's much harder to sell something that helps people to live with their catastrophes. I know there are also things like that. There are actually apps that do that, but it's easier to sell solutions as a service. So the Anthropocene is not a problem, but a catastrophe. It is a catastrophe in which humanity or humans or us have become a natural power, a natural disaster, you might say, but it is here and it is here to stay. So how to live with it now would be the question. And sadly, I cannot really tell you how to do that, but we should not fall into the trap of being sold something that will just make the Anthropocene go away. And I think very broadly speaking, there are two sides to this. The one is the techno-optimist-solutionist side that will just require us some new techniques, some new progress and this new progress, this new machine will then make everything fine. This will not be possible for the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene will require us to change as humanity, as humans, to adopt a way of living in accordance with this catastrophe. But the other way of mistreating this catastrophe is to be too optimistic in a sense of, well, we can still go back of being techno-pessimists of saying that we should just try and go back to a way of living before the Anthropocene and then everything will be fine. No, this is a catastrophe. This will stay here. We have to learn to live with it. We have to deal with it. And this excludes both of these ways of mistreating a catastrophe like a problem. We now have to think about this and this is a political job and also a job for almost all disciplines of science of thinking about how we can do that. In this way, the Anthropocene is really, really scary for me as a scientist, as a biologist, or as a programmer or whatever because as a scientist, I really like to have all the disciplines clean, separated to know what I am studying and someone else is studying something else. But here everything comes together and we need to combine the views of us, of system scientists, geologists, biologists, climate scientists, what have you with political scientists, sociologists and so on and so on. We need to think about narratives. We need to think about how we think about ourselves. So I know that I might disappoint you here, but the only thing I have left for you are some theses. And the main thing is that we have to learn to live with the Anthropocene, in the Anthropocene without destroying everything.  One thing that we need to do towards this goal is to identify as many sub-problems of the catastrophe as possible and also solve them and also solve solve them. Again, it's not really understandable why climate change is not something that is being solved, solved right now, but still so many things are holding us back. But then on the other hand, we should not turn catastrophes into problems. We should not mistreat catastrophes. We also have to identify catastrophes as such and act towards them as such. Another of my theses is that for a humane Anthropocene, we need to create a humane humanity. This is the point where social issues and environmental issues overlap. And we cannot live with the environment in a way that does not turn this catastrophe into an apocalypse if we mistreat humanity like we do now. And I think that this has something to do with capitalism, but I just want to leave it like that. It would need a really deep dialectical Marxist analysis to do that in the context of the Anthropocene. And I cannot do it here in this talk and I cannot do it as a biologist. And with that, I want to introduce you to Niels Richter, who discussed with me through all of these details and who was instrumental to this talk. Without him, this would not have happened. If you want this analysis of capitalism in the context of Anthropocene, maybe you should talk to him on Twitter or something like that. And then I want to thank you.  And I'm really happy now to take your questions. And actually, it's not really now, right? It's in a week. I'm pre-recording this, so I don't know. But if you have any more questions after this, write me on Twitter or something and see you. Yeah, thank you, Theodor. Thank you for this nice talk. Thank you, Theodor, for this nice talk. Yeah, should we go to Korea and A right away? So there are a few questions in the pad from the audience. And the first question I want to pose to you. What is the difference between the Anthropocene age and other ages which are named after what humans did? So I don't really know what the question asker means. So maybe here she refers to cultural ages, but this is a geological age. So this is like the Jurassic or the perm or something like that, which is not all of the other geological or rather geological ages are defined by geology. So what you need to do is you need to go out and find a place of Earth where you can really see in the order of soils or of ground. You need to see a certain strata, a certain place where something changes significantly. So for example, at the end of the age of the dinosaurs, there was a change in the geological age because a giant meteorite hit Earth and you could see that all of the Earth. And similarly now we can see in geology changes that are made by humans. And the one thing that science seems to focus in on is nuclear. How do you say that? Could you help me? Like a nuclear... The nuclear age or the nuclear... No, it's bronze. No, what you can see is that there is... Yeah, you can see the effects of nuclear testing and nuclear bombs around 1950. And this is something you can measure and will be able to measure in centuries to come. So in contrast to, for example, the Bronze Age where you can say, look, some people there have found something new. This is really connected to the Earth as a planet. And also it's global. So cultural ages happen at different places of Earth differently. So some groups of people go through the Bronze Age, for example, quicker than others. So I assume this also answers the question why the Anthropocene starts in 1950 because it's due to the measurements of global nuclear testing. So actually there is a huge amount of discussion about this and there are like four different places where the Anthropocene could start. It could start with people starting agriculture like way back. It could start with the beginning of the industrialization. This would be 1850 or something. It could start with when Europeans started to spread in North America because there are also some geological things happening there. But 1950 because of the atomic testing and of these great acceleration graphs that I showed in my talk, this is the date where all of the evidence comes together. So it's really not driven by discussion but scientists looking at the data and saying, really being surprised that a new epoch has begun around 1950, which is strange. I mean, my grandma was alive in the last one, right? I think the audio is gone. Can you check? Ah, yeah, that's better. So yeah, I can just imagine as a scientist, you just look at these graphs, you see they want to check out the areas and you're like, oh my God, it's 1950 and we did that. We did that and we just put our fingers on Mother Earth and left a mark. And usually as a natural scientist, so to say, or exact science or whatever, you don't really think about humans, right? I mean, as a biologist, as a microbiologist, I really care nothing about humans and I really don't think about what humans or what I do to my study object. There is always a distinction between me as a researcher and my study object. And this just breaks down in the Anthropocene, which is even mind boggling. Yes, it's like the subject has been influenced by the measurements. But we are measuring ourselves now. So why do you think that we managed to solve the ozone hole issue in a relatively short time? So after discovering F2P Ray and then banning it, and it's still in the process of being solved, but being better. But why are we struggling to do anything meaningful about climate change for decades now? So we're talking about the decades, but really it feels like nothing has happened. Nothing meaningful. Yeah, so I don't I don't think that I'm the best person to ask this because I don't know, I can just imagine. And I think one of the things is that it's easier to ban this class of chemicals than to ban CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions play in almost every process and carbon fluorine. I don't know how to pronounce them. This this class of chemicals that causes the ozone hole that sounds easier to ban on a on a political level. But I don't really know. So what you would need to look into would be, of course, the dynamics like the political dynamics at the time. So what happened where the huge demonstrations about this are not and so on. Then maybe it was an issue, one more of it's an easy problem to solve. Just just one problem versus a bunch of problems that make up a catastrophe or something that happens gradually. Constantly and it's just background noise to many people. Also, those processes that create CO2 emissions, they feel natural in contrast to this chemical.  But everything almost all all processes produce CO2 and it just doesn't feel bad. It feels like in our everyday life driving a car doesn't feel like you're destroying. But again, I don't know. This is all a conjecture. Yeah, of course. But that's what we're here for, thinking about it as everybody should. So I think there's another question. And I think it's a good follow up. We as humans love to solve problems. So how do we stop starting catastrophes? Should we just think ahead more? Or is there some kind of technique that we should teach in school? Oh, can you repeat that? This is very interesting. So yeah, so we as humans, we just love to solve problems. But how do we teach ourselves to stop starting catastrophes? So how do we how are we? How can we be more forward looking of the impact we are having? So so at first, I don't know. I don't know why I got darker now. I don't know what happened. But I don't know if whether we as humans are so interested in solving problems, you know, we should always be very careful when saying something about humanity. It might just be that I don't I don't want to assume anything. But maybe people that work with computers really like solving problems. I can imagine that many people really hate problems and solving them. They just want to be left alone. And that's fine, right? But the other part is how do we make? How will we be able to have no further catastrophes take place? And if we follow what I said about catastrophes, I don't even know whether that's possible, because that's just living life is getting into problems and also into situations which are which are catastrophes in my sense. So I don't know whether we can really it sounds too easy to say we can just do this and this and then we'll never get into any catastrophes again. I think that's something that we need to take seriously as part of living. That we will cause catastrophes in my sense. Again, not apocalypse, but like every day, like the problems that you have with your neighbor or something like that, that just takes place because you want to, I don't know. But surely we can we can do something to head off problems or I mean, more humans, more technology gives us a larger level to impact the world. So maybe we also need more far sides to look what's on the other end of that level. I mean, I think it needs to be talked maybe. I mean, of course, foresight would be helpful as well as understanding what how the other functions, right? For example, you can you can have a happy life with your neighbor if you know what he or she or they dislike or like, and then you can manage. But it will always be managing. It will not be printing out a piece of paper saying, dear neighbor, I will not get into your in problems with you and then it's solved. And of course, that means not only that means knowing more about nature or whatever and how that functions, but it always will be like this idea that my freedom ends at that point where I start to inhibit the freedom of others. That's more or less the thing. And this boundary is not fixed. It always needs to be figured out every day again. And I think something like this, there is the point of catastrophe in this figuring out how far you can go. It will be a process though. It always is. So we said that CO2 is solved, but not solved. So which is kind of weird, but what are the obvious solutions? So this is one of the corners I cut because I don't want to go into all the things that you can do. But also, I think they are just obvious. I think we have like Fridays for Future started around two years ago. And everything they say is like true. So it should be obvious and I should not need to repeat it.  It's obvious we need to cut or replace all processes that produce CO2, all of them. And then all the details that follow, that's hard. That's like really hard. And all the politics that is involved is especially hard. There's a point to Fridays for Future's goal. Look at what they're doing, go what they're saying and let's go. Yeah. And I think this is also an interesting question. Like maybe it is representative of what many people in the world are thinking. Can't we just run away from this problem? I mean, what if we do nothing? Can we just go tomorrow? So maybe it will solve itself or maybe it will solve us by making us go away. I mean, if you look into history or how you cope with other catastrophes, sometimes it's a good idea to start worshipping some sort of idol. And this way you can resolve your problem with this stuff. That's a possibility. But but we have decided to to solve solve it more or less. And we believe that science is the way to do that. And then politics, of course. So so that's a different we cannot really like running away is like starting to pray to an idol. We the the the catastrophe will follow us, of course. I mean, that's how how can you if you can promise me that we will not do the same to Mars that we will do to Earth. And if you can promise me that there will not be too much like people dying or people left behind on Earth or something like that, I might be able to to agree. But I don't believe that. Yeah, maybe we need to do the opposite first because Mars isn't really habitable. So so rather than not destroying Earth, we first would have to learn how to make another planet habitable, which is maybe a good exercise. And from a technical point of view, this might look like the same problem, right? Yes, absolutely. But is it? I don't know. I really don't.  But the problem, of course, is where are we going to be living in the meantime? Because even for Mars, it's going to take like hundreds of thousands of years. Also, that's this view of going to Mars is in a very bad way, anthropocentric. Like or less. Yes, it is. I mean, we would need to take some of these things with us. But it's it's the idea that we can go to Mars without taking almost everything living here with us. I mean, we could start making a list, right? We would need some trees. We would need some bushes. We would need the animals that feed on the trees. We would need all of the bacteria and archaea that as a microbiologist, I love so much and I understand that we need them. So prepare your big aquaria full of living organisms that we take with us to Mars. Would be just more economical to stay here, I guess. A question that just came in wouldn't it be. I'm paraphrasing, I wouldn't be great if we could. Change the meaning of the Anthropocene into something positive, like make it deserve its name by making the world better and not destroying our living space. I hope that's that's what the person asking the question meant. Yeah, that's that's a good idea. I mean, that would be that would be solving the catastrophe. You know, that would be turning a catastrophe into something positive by staying true to the name and saying, you know, humans. With the Anthropocene, you always have the problem that it sounds like humans are parasites are. And it's necessary for them to be like that. You know, if you have the Anthropocene as the age of humans, of course, humans destroy everything. How can they be otherwise? But we know that we can be theoretically. Well, be well-meaning, at least. And we can make beautiful things out of dirt. And right now we make dirt out of beautiful things. So that would be like the the only way of really going at it, of really solving the catastrophe is to turn the whole thing into a positive. Let's say like that. And then, of course, the questions begin what that entails. So what is it that right now turns us into destroyers of Earth? And it should not be, you know, it would be an easy way out of saying, yeah, it's just human nature. That's I don't believe that that's that cannot be. I mean, then everything is over and it has been over from the very beginning. And we we know that it doesn't mean need to be like that. Sorry. So what do you think is holding us back? I cannot say too much about it. I really need to think about that. It would be too easy for me to just say, you know, capitalism. That's it. But there is something in us or among us, or in the way that we organize ourselves that goes against our very interest to survive on this planet. And we need good good analysis what this is. And my. And my. Feeling would be that it is the idea of turning everything into commodities and buying everything and then turning everything into into waste products at the end. But again, you really should not quote me on that. But it sounds like a great start. I mean, we have to start somewhere. We can only solve catastrophes iteratively. So step by step, I guess. And yeah, when we start one thing and see it helps, we can stick with it. And then when we see the next thing, we could improve. We do that. And then we do that at least. Yeah, it is it is a question of relation, right? It's the question of how do humans, humanity, we, whatever relate to the outside environment nature. All these terms need to be defined finer, I guess. And right now, this relationship is defined by material relations, relations of power. So it's something somewhere in that direction. But let's let's talk about that in, I don't know, next year. Yeah. Okay. Then, yeah, we will see each other again at 15, 20. Let's talk about the rapid venture, self-betraying and severe foreshadowing.


Good morning, everybody. And afternoon, for those of you who are in a different time zone from us, you are on the west coast. This is the community college consortium OER director at the open ed consortium. And welcome to our May webinar. This is our fifth and final webinar. This is a really fun webinar because this is all about the members of our consortium and community colleges in North America and the wonderful work they are doing around OER. And we have three, actually, we have four folks to speak with you today about really exciting OER and open textbook adoption work that they are doing in their districts and colleges and states. So exciting OER today. Thank you for coming. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, we are using the Blackboard Collaborate System from the California Community College System. And we thank them for that. This webinar will be recorded and we have a captioner. And we thank our captioner for that. So the recording will have captions as well. And it will be available within a week. It's posted both on our website and also up on the open ed consortium YouTube channel. So over on the left-hand side of your screen, you should see a list of participants. And if you scroll down, you should see yourself in there. And the chat window is immediately underneath. We'll be using the chat window for most of the Q&A until we get to the end of our webinar and then we'll allow folks to use the microphone as well to speak with us. And we welcome your questions and comments as we go along. We'll answer as many as we can. But we might save some of them more complicated ones for the end. All right. Now I want to ask you to tell us where you're from. And you can do this in a couple of ways. You can type in the chat window, or you can hide your sunscreen, or you can exit your college or college university area you're from, or some of you are already jumping ahead. Thank you. You can use the toolbar. That's the second icon on the bottom, the one that has the little star. You can grab one of those and flop it over on the location on the globe. And so far, I see North America. I see some folks from the northeast and the north central We are primarily from North America. Occasionally we do get folks from overseas because of course we are part of the larger open ed consortium. So you can share with folks overseas who might be sleeping right now. Now I want to tell you a little bit about the amazing experts we have this morning to talk with you and I'm going to give them a chance actually to tell you a little bit about themselves before we get into the main part of the webinar. So I'm going to start off with one of the speakers who is the TIO and the Dean of Information Technology at Paradise Valley College. Paul, you want to introduce yourself? Good morning. Along with those responsibilities I'm also an adjunct math instructor and one of the speakers I'm currently on sabbatical and I will be talking about that a little bit later as well. Yes. Thank you Paul for joining us and Paul has had I think the privilege and pleasure of having an OER sabbatical. So we're looking forward to hearing about what Paul's been up to. And next up I'd like to introduce Dr. Sia Alvarado who is a sociology faculty at college of the canyons and also a co-author of an open textbook on sociology. Hi everyone. My name is Sia Alvarado. I'm an adjunct faculty at college of the canyons in sociology and I work to edit and write our introduction to sociology textbook. And I would like to introduce Catherine Coleman who is also a sociology faculty at college of the canyons and is also one of the co-authors of the introduction to sociology textbook. Hi. Good morning everyone. I'm Katie. I am at college of the canyons in sociology using OER in my classes for about five years now. I'm interested in helping children implement an OER degree pathway. Great. Thank you Katie. Great to have you this morning. And last but not least we have Tod Dighby from the Minnesota state colleges and universities. Tod is Assistant Director of Academic Technology and we're really thrilled to hear about great work that's been going on in Minnesota. Hi, everyone. Yes, it's Todd Digby. I'm the system director of academic technology here at our Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. I oversee areas in learning technologies like our learning management system, library systems, and other academic technologies. But in that mix, I also have been our lead from the statewide system on textbook affordability. And in recent years, it has evolved into the OER work. So welcome, everyone. Great. Great. Thank you, Todd. I think Todd is the first person from NINSCU to present with us. We had David Ernst present with us last year on the open textbook library. That's great to hear what the colleges are up to. All right. So our agenda is primarily, I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of CCC OER for those of you who might be new or you might have forgotten about CCC OER. And then we're going to get right to the heart of this presentation, which is hearing all about these great projects that are colleges. And at the end, we will have something for Q&A. All right. So the Community College Consortium for OER is coming up on its eighth anniversary of being founded. And our mission really remains primarily the same as when we were founded. We are a voice for the community colleges within the open education space. And we are all about expanding access to high quality open materials for both faculty and students. And our webinar series is part of the faculty development that we support in helping faculty and administrators and other staff stay up to date on what's happening in the field and to find out about new wonderful resources that are out there. And at the heart of it all, it's about improving student success, helping students to complete their degrees in a timely fashion and without extra debt. And I'm happy to say that we are growing. We are at over 250 colleges and 21 states and provinces. I think I mentioned this last month, but it's still exciting that we have new college members in Massachusetts, Texas, and Georgia. And so we're slowly moving in towards the center of states as well.  All right. So this morning, we are going to be talking about the growth of OER colleges, I mean, sorry, of OER projects at colleges. And so by OER, I mean creating awareness around open textbooks and open educational resources and promoting the adoption of those resources both to support faculty choice and innovation and to help students with affordability and learning as well. And I think the community colleges have been working in the OER states for about eight years now as a consortium. And it aligns very well with our open access mission of accepting the top 100% of students. And so we're really about affordability and access. And the last few years have seen a great growth and awareness of OER. There's been federal and state grants and various legislation that has supported us and has started to make this conversation far easier. And so faculty are much more, I would say faculty are more aware, administrators at colleges are becoming very aware of open education and the potential for access through it. And another thing that I'd like to point out about community colleges is that we very much have a focus on teaching and student learning. And adoption of OER has been far greater at community colleges than other four-year colleges and universities where they've participated more in creating OER. And there's nothing the matter with creating OER, but sometimes it can be far more cost efficient to adopt and adapt OER. And community colleges have really been leaders in doing that. So without further ado, I'm going to let you hear from the experts this morning. And we're going to let Paul start this morning. Okay, thanks. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I am one of the tri-chairs of the Maricopa Millions project. And one of our goals, our biggest goal, I guess, was to try and save students $5 million over five years. So we've been tracking that on our website. And our website is maricopa.edu slash OER. And we're up to after about two years on the project, $3.5 million, as you can see on the right. Then we track each semester, at least fall and spring. And we're hitting the last couple of semesters right about $1 million this semester. So we're pretty excited about that. The way we calculate that, by the way, is we do some pretty conservative numbers. We use about $100 per textbook and about 20 students per class. So we calculate it that way. So each semester, we have a call for proposals. We call it each phase in which we send out a call for courses to be developed. And we fund those one time for the district. So there's only one English 101 that's funded for the district. And the first couple of phases there, that box didn't quite go down well enough. But the first four courses finish their pilots. And we're having some peers review them this summer.  And then, as you can see, phase three and phase four, the last couple of semesters, they're in development and will be piloted in the next academic year. So we just awarded those phase four ones down there. Again, most of this information is on our website. One of our biggest success stories, I think, is the use of MyOpen Math, but we call it MathAS, our own instance of a math program. MyOpen Math, or it's also known as WAMAP, and some other names, was created by David Blitman several years ago, a math professor in the state of Washington, and was enhanced by 4,000-some videos by James Souza from Phoenix College. And then our colleagues over at Scottsdale Community College really went all in on this and took it to another level by adding all sorts of materials to it. And their entire department pretty much has gone OER. And so they've really been a great leader on that. So we continue to use that and had a big conference a few weeks ago at my college, Paradise Valley, in which we invited all the math faculty in the district that were interested in OER to take a look and do a little show and tell. That was quite successful last month. We're at about 184 sections per semester that are using just the math, the MyOpen Math, and that goes from arithmetic all the way through calculus. We're pretty happy with that, but we would like to increase the adoption of MyOpen Math, both within the district and throughout the country. And even though that looks like a lot of sections, what we discovered is that's really only about 13% of the math sections that we offer in our district. Again, we're 10 community colleges. So one of the things that we're doing, and this kind of leads into my sabbatical work, is we are working on redesigning. We're working closely with David Buttman and Lumen Learning, who is who I have had the pleasure of working with over the last few months. And the next couple months is part of my sabbatical is to help redesign MyOpen Math and update the look of it. So this is what it currently looks like. And here's a little sneak peek at what we think it's going to look like when we get done with the redesign. And we hope to, it'll probably be a year before it's fully rolled out, but we will be doing some piloting probably in the spring. We're working on that. And there's probably 1,000 faculty throughout the country. And actually, I guess we've got some users in Germany that are currently using MyOpen Math. Back to the Maricopa Millions project. One of the things we also have done is try to help students find the courses. And I think some of the other colleges around the district are doing something similar. So this is how our students look up courses in the course catalog. We call it Find a Class. And it's at classes.sis.maricopa.edu. And what they can do is a couple of things. On the left side, if they scroll down, they can choose a filter that says no cost or low cost materials. And they check that. And then it will bring up all the courses that we offer at any of our 10 colleges that are available with the materials being less than $40. In most cases, that's OER. In some cases, it's just very inexpensive textbooks. Another thing they can do is just type in OER in the keyword search and it brings up the same results. So that's been working fairly well. Sometimes it's hard to get the folks to remember to enter in the code, but we're making some progress in that area. So another part of my sabbatical along with working on the My Open Math redesign has been to visit some other colleges and see what they're doing with their OER projects and to perhaps help with some adoption at those places. I had the pleasure of meeting with some folks in Oregon. Last month, and what I learned about what they're doing is they're really doing some great stuff in Oregon. And sometimes, although we hear about it by doing some reading and reading on listservs, et cetera, until you actually go out and meet with the folks, maybe you don't learn exactly what they're doing. So I got to attend a regional conference last month in Eugene and found out that they're doing all sorts of great stuff there. They've had several regional conferences throughout the state in which they have brought in speakers from around the country to talk to folks. And they also had, at the conference I was at at least, they had a student panel, which was great. I highly recommend that bringing in students to talk about the impact that OER has had for them. And I would like to thank each of the students who spoke about how meaningful it was for them. Also, at Lane Community College, at least one student put together this manifesto and it makes a nice poster and has also shared it so that, as you can see down in the corner, there's a little CC by-license so people can modify that and use it if they'd like. The faculty have been using this website, which has been very helpful and they've had a call for proposals for grants that they'll be working on this summer. And even the legislators are getting in on the act with House Bill 2871. So a lot of great stuff going on in Oregon that I've learned about more in depth by visiting there. So I guess my point here is if you can get out and see what other folks are doing, definitely be reading about it, listening to webinars like this. But if you get an opportunity to visit, it's a great way to connect with other folks and learn what they're doing. Again, with my sabbatical, I'm working closely with the folks at Lumen Learning. And what we're discovering is a lot of times you get that initial wave of people that do development and jump right into open educational resources or whatever they are interested in, but then it's hard to get the next group. So Lumen does a really nice job of supporting those folks and taking the next steps. And they also have a number of courses available on their website that can be integrated into any learning management system with their candela system. So it's really a nice way to go there. Another thing that Lumen has provided is this impact.lumenlearning.com where you can go and you can use the sliders on the left to adjust different variables such as textbook costs, enrollment, tuition costs, and see what the impact is of using open educational resources. So I encourage you to take a look at that. And I think I'm just about out of time. So I wanted to let you know that... Oh, I also added something here. My daughter texted me actually that she did not buy a $230 textbook. So sometimes these textbook costs are way out of whack, and that's her opinion about it. Anyway, if you've got some questions, go ahead and throw them in the chat box or take a look at our website or hit us up on Twitter. Thanks. Great. Thank you very much, Paul. And we are going to hold the questions to the end, but I'll just give you an FYI poll that someone asked about the OER rubric that you guys developed in Maricopa. So if you have a link for that, it would be great to get that in the chat window and we'll come back to that at the end of the presentation. So next, it's my pleasure to introduce Pia Alvarado and Katherine Coleman, both faculty, sociology faculty at College of Italian, and also co-authors of the Introduction to Sociology textbook. That has been used over the last five years at College of the Canyons and has literally saved students millions of dollars there. Katie or Pia, please go ahead. Okay, so we are talking about the Introduction to Sociology open source textbook today, although we're also going to mention a couple of other efforts that are going on here at COC currently. The history of our intro to sociology, that textbook was originally sent to us by Paul Hammond and Ron Cheney of Utah Valley University as more of a collection of pretty thorough lecture notes. And it went under with two rounds of editing and revision by two sociology faculty members in 2010 and by 2012, two more faculty members joined and made editorial contributions and we were really able to focus on our areas of expertise within each chapter between the four of us. Then we had such great success with the intro textbook, we decided to tackle a marriage and family text and that was edited and launched with it by the four faculty members from the previous. The texts are updated and edited for content and relevant examples and pictures are added each academic year. We usually try to get this done over our summer session to have it updated by fall. So the logistics of launching this OER text in these classes, revisions are posted on our department website within our learning management system, which at CSB is Blackboard currently. We created a department page on Blackboard so our faculty are able to log in and take the entire textbook or take one chapter at a time or whatever it is that they want to use in their courses. They're also able to make editorial changes for their classes. Over 4,000 students have used the open source text for the intro book alone and it's provided for students on COC's LMS also but they are able to access the PDF version. We can also access this book anybody can on collegeopentextbooks.org. So currently at College of the Canyons we have three courses using OER materials in lieu of for-profit text. The first is Introduction to Sociology. Then our course here is called Intimate Relationships Marriage and Family and we have most recently adopted OER in our Sociology of Aging course. Now while the Marriage and Family introduction course has more traditional looking OER textbooks in our Sociology of Aging course because there wasn't necessarily a readily available Sociology of Aging textbook as opposed to something like a gerontology textbook what we did was we were able to take articles and textbook chapters and create PowerPoints from OpenStacks, Merlot, Sophia and College Open Textbook. These are some of the topics covered in that class so we can see for example the social theories of aging. I was able to borrow from one chapter from an intro book and same thing with family and aging. I was able to borrow from another intro book, Love, Intimacy and Sexuality in Old Age. I took a chapter from a human sexuality book and living arrangements and social roles. I was able to pull the National Housing Conference Report from 2014 and create an assignment out of that to meet those needs so students can participate that way. So far we have, right currently we have 33 sociology faculty at COC and almost half of us are using OER in our classes. We have across the three courses 25 sections total with about 30 to 35 students in each course and assuming a new for-profit text would be about $100 students have saved 75,000 this semester alone in these courses. It's interesting, I actually just looked up the text book I used to use about five years ago and it's now currently listed at about $145. And this semester we were able to launch a campus-wide survey to all part-time and full-time faculty asking them about OER and 17% of COC faculty responded they are currently using OER materials in their courses. It doesn't necessarily mean in lieu of a text book or for-profit text book I should say but they at least 17% are using some kind of OER material. But 87% said using OER they are either satisfied or extremely satisfied with the content and 88% of faculty responded that while they're not using currently using OER they are very interested in learning more about it. So we have started talking about and designing and hopefully implementing even more professional development opportunities across the campus in the coming months to meet that need. So one of the great things about our introduction to sociology text book is that you can use the chapters in any order. Chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. And so for an instructor they can move around from topic to topic according to the threads that they are linking within their own classes. We also have a glossary that we update fairly regularly and a chapter just finally getting through school with community college students. So for the advantages and potential disadvantages for students the greatest advantage of course is that it's free and this is a huge issue when dealing with student equity because you don't want to disadvantage a student who can afford a $200 textbook. I'm looking for a new addition to another college where we use a standard hard copy textbook and it's $250 and I can imagine that would be quite prohibitive to some of my students at the community college level. Our textbook is accessible to everyone from the first day of class because it lives in our LMS course shell. So there's no way for students to get textbooks they don't have to wait in line that first week in the bookstore. Everyone is ready to go from their very first day. The students can save, print, e-mail, and share the files without restrictions. And one of the great things that causes the canyons is that our students are able to print up to 15 pages for free in our ASD or associated student government lab as part of their student fees. And a chapter in our textbook is roughly 15 pages so they can go and print the chapter and bring it to class and continue to do that as the semester goes on. There are no heavy textbooks for students to have to carry around or to be forgotten and they can bring it chapter by chapter to class as we're covering materials. Also the text can be accessed by most noble devices the students have access to the text all the time and we don't most of our students have smartphones so as long as they're able to pull up a PDF file they can open up our textbook. One of the potential disadvantages of students is that they have to print it out if they want a paper copy. One way around that is to offer a printed copy through your bookstore. And what we figured at College of the Canyons was that the bookstore could mark up the OER text as much as the U of 4 profit text and it would still cost about $18 to print for our students. So next some of the potential advantages and disadvantages for professors and faculty in using the textbook. One of the advantages is that no orders have to go through the bookstore and especially for agents, faculty teaching on multiple campuses keeping track of deadlines for bookstores and who to contact to be a bit of a task. Professors are able to adapt the textbook to lecture not the way around. And it really takes the pressure off of a faculty member because it lets you allow the discussions in class to go wherever they need to go. So you can follow student learning and you don't have to worry about making sure that you cover the material in that chapter because you know that the chapter and the lecture and discussions all go hand in hand and the students can go home and read the material and you don't have to worry about food feeding them all that material during class. Our examples of photos and our statistics are always current. So if I, for example, were to find a great statistics when your census bureau was relevant to one of our chapters, I think though I edited and I could get it to students right away and so I don't have to worry about the outdated text that was published five, ten years ago. I was at Lakeshore Learning Center a few semesters ago and they had these prepackaged family toys from the different racial and ethnic groups. So I took a picture with my cell phone and I put into our OER text and so students get that as a relevant example. I know that in some departments the faculty are concerned about standardization. They want all faculty to use the same textbook and they want all the materials to be the same. These textbooks that we're working with, the content is standardized to begin and so if you don't do any edits then everyone has the same material and also faculty become intimately familiar with the content. So no matter how many times you read a textbook published by a big publishing company until you edit it, you really aren't as familiar with it as you become with the OER material. The chapters can be used in any order according to what you cover in your schedule and just sort of anecdotally, we found that as student success, retention and participation go up. So we did that sort of call the experiment in our department where we went from a for-profit textbook to OER material without changing anything else in the course. And we found that student success actually went up about 20%. So some of the potential disadvantages. There is an initial time investment if you want to edit the textbook before you get it to your students and also we would recommend some regular revision cycles to make sure that the material is still relevant depending on what your campus is or what organizations you're associated with you might be able to apply for grant funding for that time. You might also be able to get release time through your college like a sabbatical. It's definitely feasible for one faculty member to do editing over the course of the semester or even during a winter or summer break or they can just adopt the resources as they are. I know editing is required. For us in our department, we use this as an opportunity for faculty to get together, to work on our common goal of getting this OER textbook out to our students. And so we each sort of grab the chapter according to what our areas of specialization are and have some really excellent and fruitful discussions about the learning and content as a result. Another potential disadvantage is that the chapters can be edited by the individual and structured leading to a loss of standardization. But I actually consider that to be a great thing that I could go and edit the textbook because I can find those local examples that are relevant to my students. So for example, I'm located in Santa Clarita near Valencia, California. And so quite a few of our students know Six Blacks Magic Mountain because it's right down the street. And so I can take that and use it as an example in my chapter on culture. And so students are able to get it because it's relevant to them right away. And then the last potential disadvantage is the potential loss of their publisher resources. Again, I don't see this as too much of a disadvantage. As a faculty member, you still have access to those resources at our points and test banks. But what I was finding was that I had to do so many revisions to this material to make them relevant and current that the OER really takes away some of those frustrations. And when I was looking at sort of new textbooks to adopting my classes again, the for-profit textbook, what I found was that they had student learning outcomes for each of the chapters. But those weren't the student learning outcomes that I had for my classes that we had at our college. So OER gives you the ability to adapt the course materials to your course outline and your student learning outcomes, not the other way around. All right. Thank you, Thea and Katie.  Yes. Okay. And I did add this slide here because Anne Mavrenko, who is the department chair of sociology at College of the Canyons, and she's also a co-author along with Thea and Katie of the Introduction to Sociology textbook. She started this about five years ago. Actually, I guess it's a little over five years ago at College of the Canyons. And this year she was awarded the Open Education Excellence Award for Educators of 2015. And so we just wanted to mention Anne Mavrenko, who chairs that department. All right. Thea and Katie are very busy faculty members and they have to leave actually in a few moments in about five or 10 minutes. And so we wanted to give them a chance to answer some of your questions before we go on to Todd's presentation. So I think we can take about five minutes here if we have questions. And I noticed that there was a question earlier from Jim Julius and he asked about, do you have the percentage of teachers that use OER in lieu of textbooks at this point? We're currently working on that actually as we speak. I sent out about, I would guess, 65 emails yesterday trying to determine whether they were using completely in lieu of a textbook or if they were purchasing, requiring students to purchase anything that just wasn't named by our bookstore. But right now we are guessing it's about 15% of faculty are using completely OER led courses. Okay. Wonderful. Yeah. Well, keep us updated as you get those numbers because we'd love to share that. I think that that's probably a pretty high percentage for a college. So exciting. One other thing that came up was the link to the open textbook for introduction to sociology. College open textbooks have a print copy that you can order. But I know that at one point there was a link to the textbook from the website at your college. And I don't know, this might be a question. I know that you're dean of distance education. And of course the president of CCCOER is online. James, do you know where there might be a link to the materials? I don't know. James may have had to leave. I'll be looking for it. If we don't find it, we can send that out when we send the link to folks for the archives recording. And this is the, my email address is showing right now. So if anyone would like to have a copy of the textbook, just go ahead and email me. We have it available in two different forms. We have it in PDF chapter by chapter by chapter. And then we also have one large PDF file that is the entire textbook where you can go from chapter to chapter. But because it's one file, you'd have to sort of stick around. For us in our department, it lives in our LMS. And so individual faculty members are able to go and grab the textbook or parts of the textbook. Okay. Okay, great. Thank you, Katie, for offering people to contact you over email. And she also put her copy in Smash words if you want to take a look right away at what's available. And James, who is the dean there of distance education and learning resources, mentions that they had an OER repository at the college which they're phasing out of right now. And so that's why some of the links that used to be external are unavailable at the moment. Okay, we have a question here from Scott. Scott is asking, what is the easiest tool for faculty to edit text in order to, okay, in order to edit PDF? And Katie are answering in the chat window. Okay. Okay. So, Katie says that they have org files available. And Katie says she's able to send that in word format. So, does that answer your question, Scott? Okay, super. All right. Do we have any other questions for Thea or Katie at this time? As both of them mentioned, you can contact them over email if you do. They'd be happy to answer those after the fact and we'll move on to teaching. And we're going to move on to our next presenter which is Tosting B, the Systems Director of Academic Technology. And I know Todd was telling us yesterday that he comes from a library background. And so we're very excited to have talk about it from, of course, the perspective of getting librarians and other folks involved to create awareness amongst faculty and staff and students around OER. But Todd, please go ahead. Thanks, Inna. Thanks, Inna. Yes. And as Inna said, I do come from a library background on a librarian by an academic librarian by training and experience. And actually when I moved into the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, it was as the Director of Libraries. So, that has evolved over time. But that role actually did set me up to be told we see that centralized system-wide textbook affordability initiatives, like I said earlier, and that definitely over the last few years transitioned into a bit more focused effort around open education resources and open textbooks. So, just to tell you a little bit about our system. There's my name again. We represent the system office here. We have 31 institutions with 54 campuses across our state. 24 of them are technical and community colleges. Some of them are just technical colleges. Some of them are community colleges. Some of them are combined. And we also have seven state universities. We serve approximately 430,000 students a year. Roughly that's about 150,000 FYE. So, we're a relatively large system. And so, over the past few years, like I said, we've been tracking textbook affordability. We have some very strong student governance groups. They like student associations who are very effective in pushing for their priorities. Obviously, tuition is one. Actually, it is another, but usually heard on their list, is textbooks and cost of textbooks. So, some of the recent legislation in 2013 really led to the project that we're doing now. And this was part of one of our legislative performance goals as a system was to lower the cost associated with the total cost of education or student cost by the textbooks through the increased usage of OERs. This is actually an opportunity for us to do something we haven't normally done and that is work directly with faculty. So, as a pilot project over the last year, we started to look at how we could work with faculty and what were the barriers. So, we looked at the research, like I mentioned last year, Dave Ernst was one of the presenters here. And we actually worked quite closely looking at some of the initiatives he's done and what were some of the barriers and opportunities. But where could we be most effective in our efforts? So, looking at faculty awareness was a huge issue for adoption. So, this is just a statistic out of a report that came out a few months ago and really shows a huge faculty awareness issue of open textbooks. And that big red arrow or big red bubble is not as big for administrators. Actually, administrators know a lot more about them than faculty do, at least from this data. So, we wanted to address that awareness. And from Dave Ernst, we found, you know, from his projects at the University of Minnesota, we found that, you know, here's some of the barriers that we needed to work with faculty. One was raising awareness and that was through training and helping to find the materials since they're scattered everywhere. And we have lots of projects that helped us. You know, there's different projects as all of you are aware with these materials around. They really wanted some places they could go to one stop, find some materials. They also had quality concerns. So, they wanted to have time to get in and either review them themselves or see that other faculty in their own disciplines have reviewed them. So, they want to make sure that there was quality there. And they also wanted some support in getting it done. And so, when we looked at our project, we decided to try something. We looked at four disciplines. In our initiative, we looked at accounting, biology, mathematics and psychology. And we did a call for participation from faculty from both our two-year campuses, our colleges and our state universities. What we are really hoping to do in this initial project is hopefully get around 10 faculty members per discipline. And the reason these disciplines were chosen was because of the nature of our system. These tended to be the courses taught at all of our campuses. They tended to be high enrollment classes. And they tended to be ones that had relatively high textbook costs. So, it's sort of the low-hanging fruit here. And when we did this, we actually had quite good response. Here's the number of faculty that actually signed up. And really, you know, and this is across our different campuses. We have very independent campuses as well. So, we had good participation here. We actually had really good in biology and mathematics. And instead of just choosing 10 from each, we let everyone who wanted to participate. And so, what we did with the groups is we worked with actually the University of Minnesota in conjunction with them and said, why do we want to duplicate something else in Minnesota? So, we worked with the Open Textbook Network, Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota and the URL is at the bottom of this slide. I think there's a couple more universities in these groups. So far, I think that they've added since then. So, you'll see a few more colleges. But what we did was we worked with them on training and then actually had worked with them for their peer review process. So, what we did was we, for all these faculty to participate, there might be, there was a reason they came too. And part of the reason was, we were going to give them a stipend for this or depending on our union, a duty day. So, we actually gave approximately $500 for them to go through the training and them to actually conduct a review on a textbook. There's no pressure to adopt one, but we really did want to raise awareness among faculty at our different campuses. So, this is one way to do it was to incentivize them, recognize them for their time commitment in doing it. So, working with David Ernst at the University of Minnesota, he came in, he did some training on Creative Commons and the issues, raised some awareness about why are textbook costs so high? How is this different from before, 20 years ago for students? And why can open textbooks be one of the possibilities there? So, after the review process, it went quite good. We had a faculty participation in it. And the reviews that came in at the end of March, our set of reviews are actually not on that open textbook library yet, he's still getting them in there. But we're starting to get the data back from faculty right now. And out of those that went through the process, we actually had faculty starting to adopt already. So, 22% had started to adopt already. We actually had 47% additionally planning on adopting. So, the review and the awareness raising is paying off. 28% are undecided and we've had very few that were not planning on adopting a textbook at this point. An open textbooker has only one really made decision, no, this isn't going to work. So, and I think why this is important, given even though we had a number of just around 50 or so faculty going through the process, one of the parts when I actually did the call for participation was I intentionally asked them to list the courses they were teaching, list how many students a semester they taught, and then listed how much the textbook for each course was. That's a new version of the textbook they're doing. And when I only actually selected one of those books, the first one they listed for each of the faculty that responded the call for participation was when I added that total up for just one course per faculty member and the students they taught, that number was going to be over $900,000 a semester in costs for students and textbooks. So, even if we're at, let's say, we actually get the planning on adopting and we already adopted 22% to 47, you know, we're over close to 70% adoption, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, so potential savings. So, that is really encouraging. Now, as we move forward with our projects into the next years, you know, we really wanted to say, okay, well, listen to this, get some feedback from faculty initially that went through this. And so here's some comments from some of our faculty that went through. And really the big one that's coming back is from our math faculty. And it tends to be around the homework systems because really we did look at the Open Textbook Library really includes really an open textbook, a fully formed textbook that is there. It doesn't include sort of what we understand as more modular OER type of components or homework systems. But what we definitely heard from math faculty is that they would really like the homework system. So, this is why even what Paul was saying earlier about the my open math is really great. So, as we move forward, we need to introduce some of those other tool sets for faculty so that they can see there's a bit more of an ecosystem to work with rather than relying just on what the publisher homework test banks are. So, that's where we're starting. We're also looking at, you know, putting this out to the campuses. Now, this isn't the only open textbook project within our system. This is the only system-wide one we've done, but we have had projects like at an Okra Ramsey to the Indy College where they did a very similar process of typing and a project to implement open textbooks. So, there has been some very good work going on at our individual campuses. But what we're going to do centrally is just to keep the momentum going as we look at different possibilities like maybe identifying a sort of an open textbook champion or advocate on each campus. And now we're going to figure out who that might be. And so, our librarians across our system, for instance, are all faculty members. And so, they really relate to the teaching faculty fairly well. And, you know, in that role, as librarians, we even have one of our campuses where the librarian really is the main advocate for that. So, we want to more formalize some of those roles and hopefully we can build the momentum and offer some support to our campuses. Because from an administration standpoint, students, it's easy. It's affording the textbook. It's affording the class because the textbook costs aren't as high. But from an administration standpoint, from the data we have, students are not taking as many courses because of the textbook costs. They're actually enrolling in courses based upon the textbook costs. So, they're actually shopping around to look at courses depending upon this cost. And so, if we can make the entry level and the barriers last for these courses, we'll definitely help that retention, help getting the students get through faster. So, there's many different aspects to this work that we're looking at. And so, you know, in the future years, like I said, we're really going to see what we can do more of on a campus basis, support their efforts, and really help this campus to review the review efforts. So, and we really use their metric. You can look at the rubric at University of Minnesota at open.umn.edu project. It's a very simple 10-point review rubric. And our faculty didn't really, there wasn't any resistance in doing that. Now, we were incentivizing them, but they really did some really good reviews on the materials. And so, that is my presentation. I'm willing to take any questions you might have. Great. Yeah, thank you so much, Todd. And it's really impressive what he's done in Minnesota in a short period of time and with limited resources through peer reviews, you know, side spending faculty for doing peer reviews. So, it's really exciting. We're going to go right to questions in a moment. So, we're going to be entertaining questions for both Paul and Todd. And I did want to say that, you know, this is just a, you know, just a few OER projects that are happening at colleges throughout North America. And so, we would love to have another webinar like this in the fall and share more of those stories. So, please do contact me. We, you know, we want to share all of our colleges and the great work they're doing. And in fact, we're going to have an advisory tweet up next week. It's next Wednesday, a week from today. It'll be at noon, Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. I'll be online and some other folks from the TTT OER leadership team will be online. And just join us up, you know, and we can answer any questions you might have. If you want to share stories with us, that would be great. So, we'll see you then. And we're going to turn this over to you for questions. And we have had a lot of questions. I'm going to go back to a couple that I know we had earlier, and then we'll open it up more widely. So, Paul, there was a question earlier for you around the open course rubrics that Maricopa was using. And did we get that question answered? I think I put a link in the chat window on all our materials that we currently have up there. It includes a rubric for evaluating the proposal. We're still finalizing the rubric for the peer review so that I should have available in the next few weeks if somebody wants to email me directly. I can get that to them once we have that available in a couple of weeks. Great, great. Thank you, Paul.  So, it would be great for everyone to benefit from the work you guys have done. I just noticed my email address is an old one that may or may not still forward to me. So, I'll put my new one in the chat window. Oh, okay. Apologies, Paul. Hi. And, okay. Thank you, Quill. She said that one was good. She probably could have answered. Okay. And we have some questions about open pedagogy as well. Or I can say questions and comments. So, there was a great comment in there about, you know, we quibble about how much money students are saving, you know, because students have so many ways of getting textbooks. It's not simply walking into the bookstore. And then there was a great discussion online about all the other benefits. And one thing that came up was around the open pedagogy idea and how much students can benefit from that as well and how it really gives them control of their learning. We had a wonderful webinar on this back in November with Christy Fierro, who I believe is online. And also with Brent Ripple. Both are faculty members at community colleges that have adopted OER and have really engaged their students in producing open educational resources as well and incorporate those student products into their course over time to enrich the materials. So, I will try to get a link to that to folks. And then I want to just open this up for other questions. I may have missed some. So, you can grab the mic or you can click directly. And thank you, Mary Burgess, for putting some more open pedagogy resources in the chat window there. So, do please feel free to grab the talk button up top. That will let you speak out. And we've got Paul and Todd still here. We're waiting for questions to come in. Paul had a comment here. We need to remember that students can retain OER materials as long as the instructor allows. And that's a really good point about digital text books versus open text books. And thanks, Mary, for sharing with us that they've been doing work at BC Campus. So, BC Campus is also a member of the Open Education Consortium and Mary is on our board. And they've done just amazing work up there at BC Campus at their Open Textbook site. And they'll be presenting at the Open Textbook Summit at the end of the month. Thanks, Mary. And if you want to put a link into that, for those of you who can fit in a trip to Vancouver at the end of May, it's a wonderful event every year up there. And you get to talk with folks who are really involved in Open Textbook adoption. All right. And thank you, Jim, for your comment. All right. And there's the Open Textbook Summit. I want to give Paul and Todd a chance for any closing comments. Paul, would you like to make any closing comments before we sign off? Sure. Maybe just one. And I think it was either Katie or Thea also echoed the thoughts about if you have an opportunity to put in a proposal for either sabbatical or summer project related to OER, I encourage you to get creative in your colleges and districts. It's a hot time right now to be proposing these types of things. And often the administration will be very willing to listen to these ideas. And it's a great way to really focus on something and hopefully make an impact. Great. Thank you for that, Paul. And Todd, any closing comments? I think just one. The one thing I didn't mention is really getting, when training faculty is really doing some really good groundwork around open licenses and the creative comments efforts. Because I think that that's where we, I've had the most follow-up because there's a lot of uncertainty, especially when we push copyright and making sure people are following copyright. That is that uneasiness about just taking something and using it without permission and really doing training on the copyright issues and how creative comments works with that. The one thing we did do with our faculty of reviews was we actually made a point of saying any review you do is actually going to get a creative comments license. So it might not just be housed at the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library. Maybe the UBC wants to take and use those reviews and put them in their system as well. So we did some training and said this is how you could sit in so we made it real for them. Great, great. And obviously, OER is a great opportunity to go over that with faculty and the freedom that a creative comments license provides you over copyright and fair use. That's a great point. Yeah, and we've had some great discussion in chat window. I've been a directory to the chat window since we've finished yesterday. I've got some quill and Mary and Kristi about what we're going to do next. I'm going to open pedagogy is also very engaging for faculty and really helps faculty to be effective. I may not have captured all of the wonderful comments, so please do check those out. At this point we're at the top of the hour. I don't see any questions. I see mostly comments. So I'm going to stop the recorder and I'm going to thank once again our wonderful speakers and thank you all for coming this morning. Thank you so much for joining us this week if you're available for our tweet-up. And if not, we'll definitely see you in the fall with our fall webinars in September. So thanks again.