Thank you for tuning in. Welcome to another episode of In the Studio, and today our conversation is going to be about human rights and the champions for human rights among us. My guest is Professor Keith David Wharton-Paul. He is a professor and the Founding Director of Human Rights Studies at UC Davis. This is the first academic program of its kind in the UC Davis system. The UC California system. UC California system. Thank you. And he's a leading American historian of the Middle East and of human rights. He's an expert in the Armenian genocide and on the plight of refugee throughout history. He has lived in Syria and notably in Aleppo. Professor Wharton-Paul is the author of many scholarly publications, articles and talks and the recipient of several awards and honor. He's also the author of Being Modern in the Middle East and Bread from Stones. In Bread from Stones he discusses genocide, mass violence, human trafficking and the displacement of populations among other topics. And finally Professor Wharton-Paul and his students are the organizer of the Davis Human Rights Lectures 2017, a series of talks by prominent speakers and the series is open to the public and takes place at the UC Davis new Maneti Shrem Museum. Welcome. Thank you, Lynn. This is a great, great pleasure of mine. And by the way, if you want to learn more about Professor Wharton-Paul, just go to Wikipedia and you'll find lots of information and most of it I think is accurate. I hope so. As accurate as Wikipedia ever is. So here's my first question. In your view, what is the most flagrant disregard of human rights in the world today? I know it's a difficult question because there are many, Franklin. I think the one that most concerns me at the moment is the number of displaced and refugee people around the world. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that there's about 65 million refugees in the world today. And that's doubled since 2010. So this is a number that's increasing rapidly. And we think that the current trends continue. That number could easily double in the next 15 years. And just to give some context, 65 million people, that's the population of France, for example. One in every 113 people on the planet today as a refugee. And the reason why I think that's one of the major human rights abuses is because human rights abuses create the conditions under which people are forced to flee. People who are refugees are the most vulnerable on the planet to continued violation of their basic human rights. And the unregulated and uncontrolled movement of people often can create situations where host populations become very, in a sense, they can face continued problems of their own, but often become xenophobic and hostile and find far right wing or demagogic politicians very appealing. So it's not that there's one single human rights abuse that refugees are an outcome of the violations of human rights. They are a challenge to the global human rights system. They are vulnerable to human rights abuse. And they create political problems that can amplify existing human rights problems. That's very interesting. And of course, the statistics are an outrage, really. But beyond the outrage, do you know what is being done? If anything at the moment, internationally, I'm thinking, of course, we all know that Europe is overwhelmed with this problem at the moment, but it's not the only continent. Are you aware of some of the steps that... Well, right now the world community is really failing in having any coordinated effort to address the mass movement of people. And it's a very difficult task because it's expensive. It's oftentimes very politically dangerous to do so, to be seen as being soft on refugees and so on. I mean, the German government, for example, Angela Merkel's government, has faced some immense pushback, especially after terrorist attacks and so on, that are ascribed to asylum seekers and refugees. But there's something to keep in perspective here, though, which is that Europe's taken a million or so, for example, of Syrians. Oh, yes. And Turkey. But Turkey's taken one and a half, almost two million. The little country of Lebanon, which maybe has, on a good day, three million people in it, well, but one in four human beings in Lebanon right now is a Syrian refugee. So we need to keep these... We can't address the entire problem, but one of the first steps is to keep the problem in perspective. So wealthy states of Europe, the United States, we need to do more on our side to accommodate the movement of eligible people for resettlement. We need to reach out to states on the edges of these terrible conflicts, especially the one in Syria, to make sure that we reduce both the suffering of the refugees but also help other vulnerable parts of their societies. Places like Jordan are dealing with this the best they can, but also facing economic dislocation for their own people. So these are some of the matters to take in hand. But at the very core of it, though, the best way to deal with a refugee crisis is to make sure it doesn't happen in the first place. And ultimately, we've failed miserably in that regard. Well, you know, I'm glad that you provided this example because I think it's the best way to describe not just one human right, but many disregards for basic human rights, food, nationality, place to live. And so I think you touched on the very heart of the problem. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, well, before we go to your work here at UC Davis, so do you have hope about human rights evolving?  You must know that human rights throughout the history have been existing and non-existing. Where are we now? In my big human rights class, what you came to, the opening day, we talk about slavery. This is the first section is on slavery. And I have my students take up, we have a line I have from my boat, a very long line, and it's about 100 feet long. And we imagine that this line that goes out, we take it all the way out of the classroom, we imagine it's the last 10,000 years of history. And we talk about sort of different kinds of slavery at each point along that line. We keep moving further and further, and we get to the moment in time when human beings decided that, well, chattel slavery, this really isn't what we should be doing. And it led to terrible violence in the form of the American Civil War, but also incredible efforts to end slavery and very noble efforts. Frederick Douglass and others and Abraham Lincoln is at the very end of that rope. But as I say to my students, it happened. The weight of history supporting slavery was immense, but human beings just in the last few hundred years decided they didn't want to have slavery anymore and they were willing to fight and die to end it. And so we look at these terrible violations of human rights, and we see them as so insurmountable. And I remind myself, no, slavery, it's illegal. And we have other fields of human rights or human wrongs that we've successfully addressed as a people. So it takes will and it takes effort and it takes time and it takes patience. And these things are in short supply, unfortunately. Keith, do you think, do you believe that by making students, young people, aware of all these violations of human rights and also making them aware of what human rights are, we will be able to change their mindset or not rather the mindset, but educate them in fighting for the protection of human rights? Our students are, I mean, I know it's sort of popular to diminish the character of millennials, but I don't see that amongst my students. I think they're some of the most idealistic and committed young people I've ever encountered. And I look back at when I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, we were very cynical and very materialistic, and I don't see that amongst our young people. So they come into my courses of human rights and my colleagues are teaching courses on human rights in Latin America or human rights and gender and sexuality. And we teach courses on such horrible topics as genocide and so on. They come in with a great deal of idealism, and I see one of my roles as an educator to help sort of refocus some of that idealism in a very sort of more pragmatic approach. But at the core of that is helping students understand both what human rights are, what human rights they have, but also help them understand that one of their most important responsibilities as young people who have been given the opportunity to study at one of the greatest universities in the world is that they have the responsibility to help defend the rights of others. And that's what should make people hopeful, right? Is that we are taking some of the brightest and best of our young people in California and we are helping them understand and confirm that responsibility. And it doesn't have to mean they become international lawyers or they become, you know, these people working in the tough neighborhoods of Oakland or something before they gentrify. But the idea is that they take these ideas with them into government and society and medicine so they're always conscious of this responsibility to fight for the rights of others, wherever they are. Yes. You recently were your big idea, big idea is an initiative, your idea for a human rights institute that UC Davis was unanimously approved. Can you tell us a little more about that? UC Davis right now is mapping out some of the ideas and directions it wants to take in the future as we reach out to the community for support. And we go, and many of these ideas are about, you know, developments in brain health and agriculture and farming. But our idea to establish the first new Global Human Rights Institute on the West Coast where we're bringing the entire force of the university to bear on human rights problems was recently approved and endorsed. One of only 13 that will really put a great deal of energy behind. So I'm very pleased about that. I am too. I think it's going to be a success. Now you lived in Syria and you lived in Aleppo and so you have seen firsthand Syria the way it was before the war. I remember in 2011, we brought you in in my days at Capitol Public Radio, Jeffrey Callison of Insight interviewed you. And I often think of the words, what you said. The West, and I'm paraphrasing, the West has overlooked and ignored Syria and yet it's the country that is where the conflict is going to be the most severe and it will expand across borders. How much foresight is that? Wonderful. How do you think this conflict is going to go? That's very difficult to answer. I mean, that's an obvious thing to say. And as a historian, I prefer to look backwards than to look forward. But I think the critical issue with Syria is that even though the main city of Aleppo has been recaptured by the government, there's still terrible battles raging throughout the country and there's terrible deprivation. And a significant portion of the Syrian population is not in Syria. So I think that these wars, these civil wars, these international wars can go on and on and that our responsibility is really to try to address the kinds of suffering that these wars have caused the best way we can. And that doesn't necessarily mean military involvement and so on. That means us committing resources and time to addressing the needs of young people and others who have been forced from their homeland by this conflict. Well, I'm afraid our time is up. It went so quickly and there's so many questions. Maybe we will have a follow-up. Thank you so much, Professor Wattenpaw, for taking the time to come and explain to us what human rights are and what you do to protect human rights around the world. I'm honored that you came to talk to us. Thank you. And thank you very much, all of you, for watching. Now if you'd like to stream this episode or even go on our DCTV.davismedia.org, you can watch this interview again. And also it will be available on YouTube. And while you're there, you might want to check some of our other interviews. We have very interesting topics and absolutely wonderful speakers. From all of us here at Davis Media, thank you and see you next time.


Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Ivy Love and I'm a policy analyst with the Center on Education and Skills here at New America. First, I want to thank you all for being here with us today. We're so grateful to have you with us as we discuss how best to support our students during this really strange and difficult time of a pandemic that we're living in. But to that point, I want to acknowledge the grief and anger and fear that folks are feeling today and to acknowledge the violence is being leveled at black people today and has been leveled at black people for years, decades and centuries.  So let's all, in these 90 minutes that we're here together as we listen to and engage in today's webinar, use everything that we hear to work for racial justice and to carry that with us moving forward. At 345, that's Eastern time, so the midpoint of today's webinar, we will be joining with others across the country to pause in silence for one minute to honor the life of George Floyd. So with that said, I also want to offer a few housekeeping items before we get into the content today. So according at this webinar, as Angela mentioned will be available later, we will post this slide deck you'll notice that several presenters have links in their slides and those will be made available once we upload the full slide deck to the event webpage. Additionally, as folks on the webinar who are presenters mentioned additional resources that didn't make it into their slides will also be collecting those and will make those available on the event webpage after today's webinar. Thanks. I want to invite you all to share your thoughts and connect with each other on Twitter as well using this hashtag CC online that you'll see at the bottom of our slides. And just to encourage you again as questions come up over the course of the webinar please feel free to submit those using the Q&A function. Our events team is going to collect those and then my colleague Iris Palmer will moderate a discussion of your questions during the last portion of the webinar. So we have a wonderful group of panelists here today with a wide range of expertise on past lessons and current practices that can inform how we're responding to the COVID crisis and all the uncertainty that it introduces using open educational resources. So our presenters all have great expertise to share several of them were connected in some way to a large federal investment in community colleges that was made in response to the great recession around 10 years ago. So I do just want to share a little bit about that recession era federal investment in community colleges before we go any further. So the tax program that is the trade adjustment assistance community college and career training program. There's an acronym for you. Which our team has been researching for the past few years really highlighted the potential of community colleges to form part of the economic recovery efforts. So as the economy worsened in the great recession, people turn to community colleges to access training to help them get a different job or more security and their current work. So it's either single community colleges or consortia of institutions to do many things. They could build new programs enhance student services, create openly licensed curricula, which is the focus of today's webinar, and more, and with such a large investment of nearly $2 billion. A looming question this many years after it was, did it work? Did it achieve its aims? And our team found that it did, along with our partners at Bragg and Associates, we at New America conducted a meta analysis, which found that participants in tact were around twice as likely as non-participants to complete their programs and around 30% more likely to have some positive labor market outcome, which is either to get a job or a wage gain after their participation. We also conducted research on a few other key strategies that grantees use to support their students in tact, including enhanced coaching and advising in the position often known as a navigator. And the use of prior learning assessment to accelerate student progress. So today we've convened folks, some of whom are connected to tact or some who are connected to community colleges more broadly because while the situation where we find ourselves now with COVID is truly different from the Great Recession in many ways, we still feel that community colleges really are central to the recovery from the crisis, as well as community support and well-being. So what folks learn then is informing practice now. And that's what we want to share with you today is what practices are really supporting students at community colleges across the country today. So as I hand it over to our presenters, we'll just hear some words of wisdom from them to help us all, whether this storm and to offer students, faculty, staff, what they need through open educational resources. So with that, I am very pleased to pass the mic to our first presenter, Maria Fief. Thank you, Ivy. And thanks for that background on tact. It's an impressive history of work that went on across the nation. I'm Maria Fief. And I was a tact project director at one time, but in 2016 I moved over to the California State University in the role of partnership development and worked with the Skills Commons team to develop the repository for the tact collections coming out of the colleges. Skills Commons was designed to host all of the open materials being created and vetted under the ACT initiative by those 700 community colleges, universities, and their employer partners. The thousands of material items on Skills Commons all have Creative Commons licensing, which means anyone can freely download and use or revise any of it as they wish. By design, no costs are associated with downloading and using its content. All that is required is that you give attribution to the originators, and we can even help you with that part of the process. Skills Commons is designed for easy searches based on keywords, occupations, industries, credentials, material types. Users can also interact with our industry wheel, which is a tool that uses the NAICS codes to better pinpoint materials. The open materials organized on Skills Commons continues to be relevant to our users and we know that based on our analytics. This site has realized over four and a half million downloads and views since its inception, and the average is about 200,000 per quarter. So that tells us people are still finding this work to be pertinent. And you can go to the next slide, Ivy. Thank you. Thank you. There you are. Good. Our most recent development is this teaching and learning onsite online site. It's a COVID response resource for those who might be new to online teaching or learning. It includes full courses like hygiene, safety, infection control, as well as a plethora of goodies for CTE instructors. There are tips and tools, course links, connections to commercial tech, free online resources, and accessibility help. Just as with all of the Skills Commons material, these teaching and learning resources are free to download and revise and use as needed. And next slide, please, Ivy. Skills Commons successfully partners with organizations to develop affordable ways of managing materials through customized portals and repositories. One example is our partnership with the Ohio Manufacturers Association. The OMA leadership team identified five priority need occupations there in Ohio. And through a vetting process performed by an editorial board made up of Ohio employers, over 80 courses were deemed worthy of the OMA's stamp of excellence in engineering, industrial maintenance, machining, and a couple of others. And based on OMA's identified needs, we also added some point and click collections like soft skills and safety, women in sustainable employment, as well as one of our premier courses that we call Jumpstart to Successful Instruction. Jumpstart is a course divided into three sections, with each section holding about a dozen interactive models. Each model is designed to promote high student engagement, its self-paced, it takes about an average of 20 minutes to complete and offers progress monitoring and remediation. The full course is designed to support industry experts who may be new to teaching and can help get new instructors up and running before the first week of classes. This is perfect for CTE instructors at all levels. The Colorado Community College Online Learning Object Repository, that's a mouthful, is a good example of a customized closed system collection that can be expanded by faculty or their instructional designers. So Skills Commons built, host, and maintains the repository, and the Colorado system continues to develop its contents. The CC online faculty access the private collection through specialized logins. The Skills Commons team offers technical assistance and we also offer some customized training packages as they need. Skills Commons showcases, highlights some of the collection's strongest materials. This will be a good place for you to start if you're not familiar with Skills Commons at all. And I will make sure that Ivy has that link directly. Each of these, sorry, the users can peruse high quality vetted OER material in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, IT, energy, construction, hospitality, dev ed, and others. So for your convenience, I've added links to each of the images within the slides and no login is required on skillscommons.org. So if you have questions along the way, you can reach us at connect at skillscommons.org. We're happy to help you navigate this very large collection of OER. And we're here to answer questions today if that's, if that seems helpful. And with that Ivy, I'm going to turn it back to you. Maria, thank you so, so much for sharing these valuable resources, especially, oh dear, I have gotten out of my presentation. Let me start that back up again. Thank you so much again for sharing with us. Yes, we will be sure that everyone has access to the links that you mentioned and can get connected to Skills Commons to make the best use possible of all these wonderful resources. And with that, I want to pass the mic over to our friend daily. Hi, are you there might be muted. Sorry about that. Now, can you hear me can hear you just fine. Thanks so much. Great. Thank you Ivy for turning it over to me and for inviting me to come and talk with folks today. So the Community College Consortium for OER. Next slide is great is a community of practice for open education. We were founded over a decade ago with the vision to remove barriers to student success through cost, while inspiring faculty to innovate and expand on the open access of public two year colleges. And our founder, Dr. Martha Cantor, who's now the executive director of college promise, she has a phrase that I always love she says we, we have the top 100% of students. And so we serve what is often called the non traditional student but is actually the majority of the students at community colleges and there is a great need. Over the last decade we've grown quite a bit. We have members in 35 states, varying from small rural colleges to urban suburban and system and statewide organizations and in fact, we had many members participate in the tact grants and upload materials to skills commons and also I'm very pleased to say there's three other speakers on today who are members of our consortium and really contribute to the value. So our mission hasn't changed that much in a decade. It's still about expanding access to high quality OER supporting faculty and empowering leadership in order to ensure equity and student success. And we're actually part of a larger the open education global which has members in 40 countries and we've been a member of theirs since 2011. And I put a little picture of our homepage here and these are lists of our monthly webinars we just had one yesterday on user friendly OER course design with over 300 registrants. This is a very hot topic right now. We've been running a for two and a half years a blog series on equity diversity and inclusion and how open education can support that. And as you can see in the top right there we are most recent blog post was from Tonja Connerly professor of sociology at San Jacinto college one of our member colleges. We also share student impact stories. So this is all about our members and the wonderful work that they're doing. I wanted to talk just a little bit about our quote unquote non traditional students as the community as is often referred to our students I think they have been affected more by the pandemic than what would be considered traditional students we know that over 60% of our students who attend full time work while they're attending school about 29% almost 30% are first generation students 20% are students with disabilities. So we know that cost is a big issue for our students and next slide please. So when the pandemic occurred. We started reaching out to our members and vice versa and there was a big pivot to online resources and so with our community. We started collecting these resources and now have a set of resources that are organized by student by faculty by institution about what other folks are doing and the really high quality reusable items that people can bring to their college. We also pivoted around our webinars that were coming up so we have monthly webinars so in April we had a webinar on open pedagogy, which is really looking to engage our students in their education and helping them to persist. Throughout, not only difficult times financially prior to the pandemic but also today while they're going through this really tough time where many of our students have lost their jobs and are no doubt also facing housing issues. And in last month we had a webinar on how we are can help you create resilience at your at your campus. And we focused on enrollment accessibility universal design for learning, how you might use fair use and how to make choices around these free ed tech products that floated around right after the pandemic how do you make those choices about materials that might be free today. But as soon as the pandemic is over will of course go back to having a cost basis and so how can how can faculty make good decisions around considering OER, which is free online to students and will continue to be free online into the future. The other thing we did was we published a number of inspiring or extraordinary stories of COVID response and we really wanted to inspire people with all the really difficult news over the last few months and here is just a really brief smattering of those, which is we had Raritan College in New Jersey their manufacturing and their college advanced manufacturing team got together and started to produce masks for local hospitals. We have the open our end program out of Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin, who were sharing all of their nursing simulations so for those nursing programs that couldn't meet face to face which was most of them. There were nursing simulations online to support that laptop programs. One of our colleges and you're going to hear about this in a minute converted some of their face to face workshop dollars that were supposed to occur this summer to emergency grants for faculty to get training on OER so that they could adopt those. So this time of year so it's really some wonderful ideas and I really encourage you to go to that site and I'll provide the link to Ivy because I don't think it's there. So this time of year in May we always do an annual survey with our members and we asked them, you know, what has what has changed for you with the with the pandemic has this changed your priorities and overwhelmingly they said no OER is more important than ever yes timing can be an issue. Urgency of getting everyone online of course took precedence over the last few months, but what we can look at is we can look at integrating OER training into professional development around going online. Those digital resources that are OER can be very easily integrated into courses and so figuring out how we can work with other programs that are focused on professional development and training for our faculty. We're really concerned about student equity and persistence we know that the pandemic has not affected all populations equally and there's been a disproportionate effect on our once again non traditional students but which are our traditional students that are the majority of our students at community colleges so that keeping the costs down keeping instructional materials free as we believe is going to help our students stay connected stay enrolled and persist. Throughout this period. And finding strategic funding sources is another thing that we've been having discussions with our members about remember that OER and the adoption of OER to help our students and inspire innovation in our faculty is very very closely linked to guided pathways the national movement to guided pathways at community colleges with student equity efforts and and also with workforce as well with many of our students need to find new jobs new jobs are going to be created post the pandemic and the Perkins five money can be used for OER specifically written into the legislation and there's also the cares dollars that are coming through where which are another option as as colleges are pivoting to online how can they use those funds to help their students and one way of course is to reduce the costs for students by providing OER that will be free into the future. And so I think I probably have just about used up my time so I just wanted to say you know please join the conversation with us if this is if these are areas of interest to you if you go to our website cccoer.org under get involved you can join our email list. You can check out our calendar all of our webinars are open to the education community and we'd love to hear from you. So thank you for listening. Thank you so so much for that. We've been hearing about the CCC OER lists serve from everyone we talked to so I'll put in another plug for that. And for all the awesome resources webinars and more that they offer. So thank you share and we're so glad to have you with us and I would love to pass the mic over to you. Great. Well thank you for having me. I think this has been really exciting. I guess if you go to the next slide I sort of wrote out who I am. My name is Sharon Liu and I'm a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education. I work in the Office of Educational Technology and what we are charged to do is think about the national vision and a strategy for how educational technology of all sorts or technology generally can be used in education to transform teaching and learning to promote the awareness and effective use of technologies by our stakeholders including states and districts and post secondary educational institutions as well as workforce training providers. And also to just sort of think about how across the federal across our agency and other federal agencies we can use technology effectively so that education can be available for all students. And I guess I think I got invited because I used to work at the Department of Labor on a little program called TACT and so excited actually to see all the names of the attendees.  As like time has gone and to think about how like our investment really did actually make an impact for people has been a really exciting thing for me so thank you for having me. Would you mind going to the next slide please. So I'm going to talk a little bit not about the specific items at the moment, but I think that what I'll try to do is give a general framework for why does the federal government think open education and open licensing generally is really important. And essentially it's the sentence that is on the bottom of the slides like, you know, the Department of Education in particular is, I guess, an offshoot of the civil rights era movements and the when it was established it was really to provide opportunity for all students regardless of their background. And open education is an opportunity for us to think about promoting equity and especially benefiting resource poor stakeholders. And it allows us to do this in a number of ways. So, you know, TACT was a $2 billion investment by by a department, but you know that kind of money doesn't come around all of the time. And then so we have some questions about like, well, with all of the investments that we do make how can we broaden its impact right so how can we help to scale our investments by either reducing the duplication encouraging diversity of the ideas and the, you know, the products being created. Or is it like making sure or providing assistance in helping products be shared as broadly as possible. So for example, like teaching and learning resources being put on a website like skills common, and then being accessed by any number of individuals. And is there an element of it that involves removing barriers to access. So, you know, at the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, there are many different kinds of training curricula produced. There are assessments technology enabled tools. But the question is like, do the general public know that these things are available to them. And if they knew about them, would they feel comfortable accessing them and using them or would they feel like there's additional permission that they need to seek. And we also think that there's an important role in sort of accelerating innovation so stimulating the develop derivative the development of derivative works, creating products on top of the openly licensed materials and thinking about how that has grown and like sort of the creative ways that the things that we have funded have been used. Would you please go to the next slide and a couple of other things just on the content themselves. This is an excellent way of making sure that the content is always relevant and high quality. We all know on this call how quickly the work skills needed for workforce change. And as community colleges and you know training providers look at different ways that they can adapt the things that they already have. You know an open license allows people to just take the materials and make any sort of either regional adjustments adjustments that update the description of the skills or the types of skills being offered by courses. And to make sure that you know if their materials that aren't sort of high quality and more that they can be like fixed or adjusted at any time. And at the same time I think there's a huge role that open licenses play in empowering educators. So thinking about an instructor in a course or a teacher in a classroom being able to take control and say like yes this is what I would like to teach to my students and this is what my students need and really just supporting them as they are the creative professionals that they are. So, I'll give you an example and this is the question that I think did it work right so I'll just give it this is a tacked round one grant that was run out of the Washington State Community Technical College system with their workforce partner and it's actually like in the course of creating all of this aerospace and curriculum we got an request from a USAID grantee that was interested in figuring out how to make that same content available for their technical high school system, because they have an aerospace cluster and they reached out because they asked us like hey you know can we just take some of your material what permissions do we need. Who do we ask for you know copyrights for do we have to like pay royalties but we were able to say like you know all of these are available under Creative Commons license and so please take and adjust and you know translate into Spanish add additional layers underneath the career pathway so that they stack into the community college level and adjust according to the different the specifics of the partners in your aerospace cluster so we thought that was a really exciting project and an excellent example of impact that openly licensed materials can have. Would you mind going to the next one okay. These are two from the Department of Education's grant. The first in the world grant program that was available for institutions of higher ed in FY 14 and 15. Just a quick you know all of the materials that were available made through the first in the world grant program were openly licensed as well. And a key example of that is the university system of Maryland and their math initiative. They were redesigning a pathway and they were able to with our funding add a statistics pathway so that not only did the system institutions but the community colleges in Maryland. Like, could they could access the material. And we also have other programs like our education technology media materials program that is funded through the individuals with disabilities act. You know one of our grantees benedict tech runs a diagram center to make materials that are for individuals with visual disabilities, available to the public and freely available. So I guess I'll just stop here for the moment with these last two things that are sort of upcoming opportunities so one of the things to note is that as time passed, in addition to the specific grant programs that I just mentioned, the requirement to use open licenses became department wide for both the Department of Labor as well as Department of Education, so that anyone who receives any money through the departments, either of the departments through a discretionary process has to openly license the materials that they produce and to make them and in the case of the Department of Education, make them discoverable to the public. And this includes a very important investment that we have currently, I just, I wrote this this is the cares act education station fund it's a discretionary fund. Right now it's the K to 12 version is open for competition so I'm a little bit limited in what I can talk about. One of the things that is within the K to 12 cares fund is absolute priority to which is virtual learning and course access programs with the goal of making materials available to all students, especially those impacted the most by so that students can have these materials at like low cost or no cost. And this is an excellent example of how open educational resources could come into a lot of states. There is a sort of a rethinking education and workforce version the sort of post secondary workforce version of the cares funding that will be an additional 150 ish million dollars that is coming soon and that will also have this open licensing grant. Also coming in the fall of 2020 is another round of the open textbook pilot program, and there will be approximately $7 million for institutions of higher education. I was glad that you know mentioned open RN Chippewa State, sorry Chippewa Valley is actually one of our second round grantees, as well as the Arizona State University open active textbook project that includes also Maricopa and Ivy Tech and Miami as well as Libra text, who was our first round grantees so we have a lot of excellent opportunities specifically around open education. We hope that you all take advantage of these and continue the great work, and I'll just close by saying if you have any questions about any of these please feel free to ask me I'm happy to talk about them at any time. Thank you Sharon. Really interesting to learn about the federal perspective there I learned a lot from your presentation, and we are happy to. We I don't have a full contact slide at the end but we're happy to connect you with print presenters. Feel free to reach out reach out to us here at New America and we can, we can do that. I'll hand the mic over to James in just one second. I want to remind everyone who, and to point out for those who may have joined late at 345, which is in about nine minutes. We will be pausing in solidarity with folks across the country to take one minute of silence and reflection in honor of George Floyd. So, James I'm going to hand to you and I know what you and I can both keep our eyes on the clock okay. Thank you very much Ivy is the audio good. The audio is perfect you're good to go. Alright, thank you so much Ivy thanks everybody James Galapagross Clyde College of the canyons. Next slide please. At college the canyons, which is located in the greater Los Angeles County area we are one of the 114 California Community Colleges and as I mentioned we're proud to serve the top 100% of students. In the introduction I'm an academic dean, which means I get to work alongside our library folks are tutoring center our online education team. And in our institution online education is the department or the unit that manages our we are open educational resources initiative. As you dive into OER you'll find that we are lives in a lot of different places on the org chart it might be your center for teaching it might be professional development it might be light your academic library. And or it might be your online education team in our case. I also have the had the good fortune of working with with a lot of grants and working with a lot of friends who are also here on the webinar today. I'm very fortunate to be a lead on various state and national OER projects. Again, with many of the folks who are here and, and hopefully those of you who are new to the OER world, you can get a sense that the OER community is very welcoming and very friendly and very supportive so reach out to any of us we'd love to welcome new people. Quick word about my institution college of the canyons were a medium large ish institution in my world that's means we serve around 32,000 students per year. We offer students around 170 degree and certificate programs we are a proud Hispanic serving institution and pre COVID-19 around 25% of our schedule of classes was online. Of course that's now one well probably 99% of our schedule is is online so our incredible online education team has gone from serving 25% of our faculty and students to supporting 100% in a very short time. I think that many of you can identify with that. We're quite fortunate to be able to develop and deploy a survey of our students in the, I think about one month into the transition to remote and ask them some key questions and I'm sharing some of that key data here. 62% of our students said gosh, we're not able to learn as well post COVID for a lot of different reasons not necessarily when we drill down into the data it's not necessarily because they they didn't like the online class format, but rather we think that it's the transition the rapid transition and on the part of our faculty sometimes not having had enough opportunity to be fully trained and prepare their instructional materials to make the pivot from face to face class to online. We also found overwhelmingly our students said, oh yeah I'm pretty comfortable with technology that's that's really not the issue the issue is getting access to the technology these days. We use the computer labs at the at the college or I sure I have a computer at home but I'm sharing it with five family members now and in half of those family members are obligated to use the computer all day long for work so how the heck am I supposed to do my homework now. We also found that students identified the top issues that they're dealing with as too many distractions, going back to whether it's the just the anxiety in the world or the aforementioned battle over who gets to access the computer now. And also the mental health 59% of our students at the top their top barrier to succeeding right now is mental health so holy smokes that's that's a significant input for not only my institution but I think all of us so I encourage you all if you have not yet done this at your institutions to please begin your planning for next semester with with the student voice. Next slide please. I'd like to share a couple of strategies that we dove into or that. Well, I shouldn't shouldn't overstate it that emerged as we frantically tried to keep our, our heads above water I think as many of you also have done. We were able to partner across the institution we found that the silos magically disappeared our faculty collaborated wonderfully with our online ed team and we collaborated wonderfully with our IT folks. Just to get the dang job done to expand our licenses for zoom to get people trained to teach online. One really great example was the collaboration between between our student services arm of the institution which undertook to provide students with laptops and our college foundation which kindly and generously stepped in to help fund that initiative. When the student services folks ran out of money to buy all the laptops for our students. And of course, this this ties into the end of this transition ties into access to instructional materials it's not just a matter of getting getting faculty transitioned or getting students transition to using zoom or using canvas or using an L learning management system now. It's also a matter of them, continuing to have access to learning materials, probably a number of you have thought about how the heck do we make sure that students have their textbooks now or other instructional materials and I would encourage you to act now. We need students learning but also think about what happens then what happens next. We need those instructional materials now, but there are there may be consequences later. We've see in the library world. Many, many, many private commercial vendors of of resources and ebooks and course course packs. Students who are have waved access fees to institutions and students for the duration of the spring semester. Oh, how generous of them. But what we know will happen is that once the students and faculty are accustomed to those free resources, the fees will be turned back on faculty will have built their courses around those new materials, and it will be difficult to extract the faculty from those free resources they built their courses around and we will have exposed our students to the data surveillance and exploitation of those commercial commercial products. So be very I really encourage you to be cautious about the steps you take now to help your students now there may very well be consequences later.   Remember, people don't know what they don't know. I know my online ed team and folks around the institution have been provided to this left and right to to inform a student. Click on this link or download this file. It's easy enough for us to say if we do that every day students don't understand that our colleagues don't understand what we're talking about sometimes. We really need to be be conscious to unpack our jargon. I think in many institutions. As I said, we've gone from supporting a small portion of the institution to everyone. We're interfacing with folks who haven't come to our training for years and years. They haven't understood what we are is they haven't understood what open licenses are they don't haven't understood what the technology is to teach online. So, keep that kiss principle in mind. Next slide please. James we have just hit 345 so before we go on to the next slide we do want to step in and just join in solidarity with others who right now are taking a moment of silence and reflection to honor the life of George Floyd and recognize the violence that was leveled at him and the violence that is isn't has been leveled at black folks for a very, very long time. So please join with us in one moment of silence. Thank you everyone. Let's carry that with us for the rest of the day and every step moving forward and James I'm going to flip this slide and hand it back over to you for some additional words of wisdom. Thank you Ivy and thank you for giving me the opportunity to participate in that moment of silence publicly and with members of my community I really appreciate that. So, words of advice in regards to the transition to online learning and supporting online learning with open educational resources. If you are not familiar with the concept of humanizing online learning, please become familiar with that concept to shout out to Michelle Pacansky Brock from California Community Colleges who has promoted that phrase and that approach.   So there's some great, great strategies out there to humanize online teaching and learning. Also, while you're doing that remember that faculty and students are colleagues they need just in time training and support, no matter how much we may have planned. Our students and our faculty colleagues are dealing with the world, whether it's the world. Whether it inflicts violence on people in the name of the state, or it's the stress of dealing with the pandemic. People are ready when they're ready they're ready to learn when they're ready so we need to be ready to support them. And again a caution about prioritizing expediency over equity. Nor the incredible diversity and array of free openly licensed resources that are available today, particularly for the Community College level courses. I don't want to overstate it and say it borders on, you know willful negligence but it's willful. The ignorance of the inequities that we see in our classrooms. Utilizing OER and humanizing online learning is a way to bring more people into our educational opportunities and those are ways to bring people into the opportunities that are promised and often not delivered. I would encourage you all to use the OER that my team at College of Candidates has produced. If you're looking for Community College level lower division open textbooks ranging from anthropology and astronomy to water technology and lots of courses in between. Check out our OER website and you're free to use those textbooks now. And I will end again pointing us back to the voice of our students, trust our students, understand where our students are coming from and what they are telling us through the opportunities we give them or don't give them to tell us. Thanks very much. James thank you so much for your worth of advice and all of the resources that you shared. Really, really helpful to folks here with us. Amy, I am very happy to hand the mic over to you. I am Amy Hoffer with Open Oregon Educational Resources which is the statewide OER program in Oregon. Thanks so much for including me and I just want to note that we're coming up on the hour in this session. I believe goes until 1.30 but for folks that do need to drop away it's being recorded and slides will be available so if you need to catch up later you can. Open Oregon Educational Resources supports affordability for community college and university students and facilitates widespread adoption of open low cost, high quality materials. As I mentioned, I'm an OER coordinator for Oregon 17 community colleges and 7 universities. Oregon has about 260,000 community college students by headcount. And I really liked the demographics that Una mentioned earlier and I think that one of the things that really pops out to me looking at our data in Oregon is that 50% of our community college students are early or mid career non traditional students. We really don't have that many, you know, 18 year old high school graduates having straight into community colleges here in Oregon, you know, as in other states. And, you know, we've really got people in really different stages of their lives and struggling a variety of responsibilities and just a wide variety of academic goals that they're showing up for. And what we're finding, you know, as in other states is that COVID-19 is exposing inequity and access to the tools that our students need for remote learning, whether that might be devices or wifi or space to focus. And, you know, we're seeing other kinds of inequities that's really weighing on everybody's mind right now, whether people are using open or traditionally copyrighted materials, you know, moving the cost barrier doesn't automatically make those materials more equitable or fully accessible or representative of our diverse communities. And as James said, I'm grateful to be thinking about these issues with my community right now. So let's go to the next slide. In terms of the pivot to remote learning that we had to do this spring, the strategies that emerged in my program in Oregon. The very first thing that I realized I needed to do was just take a less is more approach to open education. Faculty were really flooded with inflammation, especially right. It's during spring break and during our spring term or on quarters in Oregon. And so people that know me know that I like to send a lot of email, but I really put some thought into holding back and being very targeted when I did send email in order to not contribute to the information overload. And now that we have made our way through that really big rush to pivot during spring term. And we're starting to have a breathing room as we head into summer and for fall. So we're finding that during the pivot, we might have made some decisions in a big hurry that we might want to revisit or we do as we get ready for fall. So we did a redesign in spring term and now do we need to do a redesign at least the final components for our courses. So we have open educational resources that I want to mention is most are born digital and they're available for free online, but they're also available in print at low cost. So, you know, if faculty are looking for ways to make sure that everybody has access. Maybe that means the summer really diving into understanding how to make print copies available to students who need them, you know, to give one example. Another issue that came up as you mentioned is we saw some, you know, special offers or special cases of fair use in order to provide emergency access to copyrighted all rights reserved course materials this spring. And those offers or those fair use arguments aren't necessarily going to be available once we move out of the emergency mode. And so I've got a link to some copyright guidance from the open or again educational resources FAQ that can help people understand why choosing open course materials can be a more sustainable decision for the long term rather than kind of turning into a proposal with a short term solution. And one more thing that I wanted to mention, I saw the question that somebody asked about long term access, you know, building a reference shelf for your teacher career. And I just wanted to take a second to say that that's such a good point. And with open educational resources, the open license gives permission to retain the resources. And this is a really important permission from the perspective, it's like the opposite of a rental, you can keep your course materials forever. And from the faculty perspective, it means that if you adopt an open educational resource, you can download and save a local copy and not depend on a third party server that is found to go down during midterm when everybody is in the crisis about it. So I just wanted to respond to that question in the Q&A while I'm here. So let's go to the next slide. In terms of advice, the first piece of advice I would give is to, you know, let's be gentle with ourselves realizing that you've been delayed by the pandemic is a totally fine answer to where you're at with your OER goals right now. In terms of who's here, I think we have a pretty big range of expertise from beginners and all the way across the spectrum of people that are really familiar with using open educational resources and if things needed to go on pause this spring, I think that's really fine. And now we've got a little bit more breathing room to look around at. I'm just wondering anecdotally, who were already using open educational resources heading into spring term felt like they were ahead. Their students already had access to the course content they didn't need to make a special fair use argument to make sure that their students had the learning materials that they needed. So, you know, I'm hoping to capture some testimonials from those faculty if I can, and I hope that others will as well, because for faculty and instructors to hear from their colleagues is very powerful. And I would also just say like, if we aren't able to capture those testimonials, that's also fine. It's hard to ask faculty to do one more thing right now. And the last thing I just wanted to say is that, you know, students are really feeling the hardship of the pandemic right now in terms of health impacts and economic impacts and all the ripple effects that are happening. This is the right time to make changes that are going to help our students manage their budget. So thank you to everybody on the call for what you're doing for students and for really keeping students success in mind. So, thank you. Thank you, Amy really appreciate your words and sharing a little bit of context for us from Oregon was really helpful. And now for our last presenter of the day we are very excited to have Matthew bloom here Matthew I'm going to pass it over to you. Thank you very much. Yes, my name is Matthew bloom. I am English faculty at Scottsville Community College, which is in the Maricopa Community Colleges District which is the Phoenix area of Arizona United States. I am actually on full reassignment this is my third year as the open educational resource coordinator for the entire Maricopa Community College district which has and separately accredited colleges all connected by district leadership district and we have approximately 200,000 students a year across those colleges 1400 faculty, you know, residential faculty. It's kind of a beast you know and so the coordinating something like that can be somewhat challenging because a lot of it is just trying to figure out what people are doing what they need in terms of access to resources or what we are then at least low cost or no cost alternatives to the kind of costly traditional textbooks. What we have been doing since 2013 is the Maricopa millions OER project, which has focused on getting faculty to adapt and adopt open educational resources in their classrooms across their departments and then ideally also fostering collaborative partnerships between faculty across the colleges so that we can kind of maximize the impact that we're making. What we have also been doing is we do a lot of student outreach events across the colleges where we'll set up on high traffic areas and of course this is pre coded but we would set up and engage directly with students and in terms of discussing the cost of the access to the learning materials, you know what they do in order when they see that a textbook costs a lot of money a lot of students will actually drop a class or they'll just do whatever they can do to just not buy the book and also report building experience also to do that with you to engage with your students in that way. But we have a team and this is one of the takeaways I think that I always like to try to any kind of talk I ever do about OER and about how to make an OER initiative work. I would also like to pretend like I designed the Maricopa Millions initiative, I basically inherited something that was already working well and I'm doing my best to maintain it, and I wouldn't be able to do it if it weren't for a team that we have administrators, faculty, instructional designers, IT from across our district and so we all work together and we are a very diverse district as well. And just when it comes to what they are looking for that they need and this is pre COVID still, we had, we are still, but we had been working for a couple years on a massive transformation to a guided pathways model to provide our students with the suite of support necessary to, you know, basically from the first day when they enroll to, you know, completing their degree or credential at the end, making sure that they have all the resources that are needed, and that they have the direction that's there. We've tried our best throughout that process to embed open educational resources into that mission, because access to the learning materials is central to student success in many ways and I think we've already discussed that. If you want to go ahead and go to the next slide I think I can kind of contextualize this a little bit more now that we have found ourselves in a crisis situation. One of, I would say probably the most important strategies that we have tried to employ is just continuing to do to do what we were doing before right so consistency, despite all things. For example, we provide faculty grant opportunities, we provide faculty training opportunities to learn about oh we are. We provide them with support when they have questions and our network, you know, folks on our team across the colleges are really able to provide that we wanted to keep that going. So, there were a few days a few ways in which we wanted to do that we kept offering the grants, we continued to we started thinking about how we can offer professional development and trainings on online, which we had wanted to do in the first year that we were ready. And I can't really speak for all instructors at all for other institutions, but I would say one thing about practitioners of open education is that they tend to be already prepared to teach online, or at least they tend to be already prepared to, you know, deliver some sort of instruction in a digital way, and in ways that are non traditional. You know, we want to support that whether it's having students engaged in renewable assignments where they are kind of co creating the curriculum for the course or co creating knowledge generally. Along with the instructors those kinds of learning experiences for students, we wanted to try to continue to promote that. And so there's two specific things that I would say in terms of the feature that we had to actually kind of tweak a little bit or things that we change slightly to meet the increasing demand for access to online materials access to open materials during the crisis and so one of those things was we saw. So, the context obviously I think we all know but we had many faculty that were scrambling to transition to online. Now, some of those faculty were already initiated into this open educational resources mystery. And those faculty were able to take over, or I should say assume a mentoring role. So if we have faculty members who during this time of crisis where, you know, trying to make all these changes to their courses, we wanted to identify those faculty who we felt were trying to grow into some sort of a leadership position, or to give them the opportunity to share their expertise with some of the other faculty members in our district, who maybe in a different discipline maybe at a different college, who are not initiated and are struggling in this like crisis moment to try to find materials online for their students. So what we did was we look back through our roster of all of the faculty and staff that we've had go through our trainings and earn our OER practitioner credential or our OER maker badge. So those are two different badges that we've offered, one of which is the result of a seven part workshop and the other is the result of basically creating and publishing OER. And so what we did was we kind of went to them and we asked that group of experienced practitioners if they would be willing to serve as mentors for some people who might be just starting their journey into open education at this crisis time. And so far, it's, we had some interest, in fact, we had more interest from those who were interested in being mentors than those who are interested in being mentees. And as Amy and some other folks have kind of alluded to, there's a lot of stuff going on. So we didn't want to introduce too many new things, but this is an opportunity for us to kind of build out the leadership strength in terms of how open education is practiced across our district, while also providing support to people who may have questions in a way that is somewhat sustainable. I mean, there's not any funding involved in this and it really is just a, it's kind of like an informal mentor-mentee relationship. You just kind of connect to people because of the fact that one of them has experienced that the other may benefit from and that the two parties get together and basically how they interact in terms of the mentorship is really up to them. But the other thing, and this is something that has garnered a lot more attention is the OER emergency grants, which we decided to offer. We were going to do, we had some trainings and we had some physical events that we were going to be planning, that we were planning for this summer and that we had to cancel. And so since we had additional money in our budget, we decided we would focus that money in a way that would make it really easy, relatively easy for faculty to get a small grant. There were two tiers to these grants. One was $350 and the other was $700. So that's approximately the equivalent of 10 clock hours and 20 clock hours based on how the contracts are paid in our district. So what we did was we wanted to make it simple for faculty who are in this moment creating materials that they are then going, you know, in order to provide their students with the content online. We know a lot of people are scrambling to make stuff or find stuff. And what we wanted to do was not, you know, they don't have time to like write the whole course right now. But what they might have time to do is they might find that the additional money is incentive enough for them to take the extra steps to ensure that number one, they are not relying on what's already been kind of commented on here previously which is not relying on stuff that's free now but won't be free later. We also wanted to encourage them to make sure that they were creating or adapting materials in a way that was ethical and legal, right, according to copyright and So that those materials could then be shared in the future as well so that it's actually a contribution to the materials that we let we consider our catalog, which by the way this link goes to our oh we are emergency grant but if you are canvas user, you can go to comments and type in mmoer that's the search type that you can use to find the materials that a lot of our faculty have self published over the last few years. So the or your emergency grants have been a really great opportunity if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide, I will just kind of finish up with a couple of quick things. So what I have found and I'm sure that this is not profound but it's really important to work with other institutions, not just within your institution obviously cross discipline cross different kind of stakeholders is always important to, but one of the best things that I've found is working with ccco we are working with people from college of the canyons working with Montgomery College and quantum polytechnic right now we have a partnership going on with an open pedagogy fellowship and so these kinds of opportunities spread out the workload and to maximize the impact in a way that I think is really great. I also want to stress that this is the second point here this is, you know, a lot of times I think we are. A lot of times, I think that we underestimate our students and it is important for us to remember that while some of them are not capable of doing things that's just like it is with all humans and believe I work with faculty and people all the time I'm back to myself and I know that we all have our, points where we're just kind of don't get something but students are actually many times very capable of succeeding in an online environment they're already growing up in a world where they are constantly sharing and creating online. So we can harness that and we can really use that as an opportunity to reflect what it means to be digitally literate or literate at all in the 21st century. And then finally, don't pressure faculty. It really is about advocacy and committing to provide support, but as soon as faculty feel like they're being pressured so there's my own going on. As soon as faculty feel pressure, then that is when there tends to be a lot of tension so I would strongly recommend avoiding that. That's it. Matthew thank you so much it was really wonderful to hear everything that's going on at Maricopa and the many ways that you're supporting other faculty members and members of the greater college community at large. So folks we are moving into question time and my wonderful colleague Iris Palmer will be moderating a discussion. So if you haven't sent in any questions that have come to mind for you please feel free to do that right now and we'll get to it. All right, Iris. Thanks so much Ivy. My name is Iris Palmer. I'm a senior advisor for higher education and the workforce here at New America. And you all have asked a ton of questions already and I'm really excited to get started in this conversation. First I just like to reiterate that all the resources that have been mentioned by people presenting today as well as the presentation with the embedded links will be provided on the website and we'll be able to send out the recording, the presentation and the resources to people who participated in this webinar today so thank you so much for all the questions about the amazing resources that our panelists have pointed out they will absolutely be available to you and you should be able to go in and access them at your leisure. So my first question is for Maria, and I think I know the answer to this one Maria, but somebody just wanted clarification. Can institutions outside of the United States access and use the resources on skills commons. Yes, in fact, most countries across the globe are accessing skills commons I think there are about eight countries that haven't tapped into us yet, but we've got some pretty wide exposure. Wonderful thank you Maria appreciate that clarification. So the next one is for Sharon Sharon, you talked a little bit about the, how the faculty can bet open educational resources. This person was wondering if there was a particular website or a place to go for, but for resources that have been vetted by faculty already. So, thanks for the question. So let me just clarify a couple of things so first, I wasn't, I think that I may not have been clear I wasn't suggesting that there was necessarily one place that had a lot of resources that had been vetted. Obviously, we've been on a call with a lot of like really great projects that were mentioned and all of those I would consider materials that are vetted by the faculty members either at Maricopa or at any of the colleges that were mentioned. So please, like one of the things about open education is that the resources are freely available without copyright restriction to people so please take those as instead of you know starting from scratch. I think that the quality come comment I made was more to suggest that, for example, if you purchased textbook and you noticed that there was an error. You would have to wait for the publisher to issue errata and it would take a little while versus with something that you have the direct copyright control over you can find out the information and make the edits. Just in that moment, or as you're ready or once you've researched it, or if there's materials that are outdated. You can make the corrections so for example in K to 12 a lot of times, you know, like students are taught out of books that are purchased on an eight year cycle so you know is Pluto a planet. Yes, it was and then it wasn't and then it sort of was something else. I was the president of the United States. And, you know, a lot of those little bits of inaccuracies are incorrect because of just passage of time and to be able to in the moment adjust that information to update it and to keep it current is a really was I think the point that I was trying to make. So thanks for helping me clarify that. Thank you for clarifying that and the next question is also for you. And that is the example that you shared with the USA ID grantee, and the, I believe it was a pilot or aviation resource. Can you share which country that was. That was for Mexico and I dropped it in the chat the link to the project so rudas was a USA ID funded grant program that focused on workforce development for youth and youth being you know not just like K to 12 but also the technical high school and the technical college system and so that one of their grantees was is the the form for the, sorry, I, I can't remember the, it's FYI, I think the International Foundation for youth and they were the USA ID grantees that worked with Air Washington grantees to figure out all of the stuff. I really appreciate that and last question for you. Can you give us any more information about the way that the textbook pilot sites might be selected this time around it will it substantially change in any way. I think that one of the things that I can send you is our notice of proposed priorities, and we did receive a number of comments and we did ask some very specific questions about just for feedback on what worked last time what didn't work. We are sifting through those questions and the responses that we got and we are having a number of questions just about that. So thank you to everyone who contributed. It helps us in our thinking a lot and we estimate that later in the summer we should have the final priorities and the announcement available. Thank you so much we will absolutely share that in our resource section. Thank you for for answering those questions. James, somebody is curious about the survey tool or questionnaire you used with your students. Is that accessible to others and I mean I'm assuming it is but hopefully it is. And is it can it be used for knowing about technology access related concerns as well as learning challenges concerns. Yes, I saw that question in the Q&A and I was so happy to see it. I just want to double check with our institutional research folks who created that survey but I will place in the chat. A link to the survey results as part of a slide show that was shared publicly at my institution so one can certainly extract from that what the questions were but I'll check in with our institutional research folks about sharing the actual actual instrument. Thanks James and we will also share that in our resources on the website. Okay. So the next message, I think Amy actually addressed the next question, which was how we can utilize how we can sort of store and curate OER texts and learning pieces for future reference for students as they go into their careers. I don't just wanted to open this up and if anyone else wanted to comment and answer that question about how to do that well. I just unmute your microphone if you're interested if not we'll move on. James. Yeah, I will repeat what I what I wrote in the chat that is one of the fabulous things about openly licensed content I think both Sharon and Amy mentioned this is is the right to retain the content. So, certainly in a lot of the trades fields or career education fields we understand that folks want students might want to retain those materials as a future reference in their profession. Well, we are certainly permits you to do that much much more easily than than commercial content that's that's hidden behind a paywall. I really appreciate that James and I'm sorry if we're repeating things that were in the chat. I hope I don't know if anybody for everybody saw that it's, I think it's still very helpful to actually openly discuss it. So the next one is actually about encouraging faculty adoption which was it which was actually addressed by several of you but I just want to give you an opportunity to readdress it. This person says, as a librarian, a number of times the number of times I've struggled with convincing and motivating faculty about OER as an authentic and reliable resource because a number of them have published their articles with publishers, which are not open access faculty is finding it difficult to acknowledge this idea. How do you convince faculty to consider OER is a reliable resource and a source of learning. Yeah, I'd be happy to take that one. You know, when I give workshops to faculty about this I take them to the OER repositories and I show them the peer reviews that are done by faculty in higher ed institutions and I tell them about the process of developing those materials. So most of our OER repositories have a peer review process and many of their resources are peer reviewed and you can read those online. OpenStacks has a slightly different policy so that I think many of you know about OpenStacks which has over 37 textbooks focused on introductory courses and business. And they actually do the peer review during production of their textbooks. So I really point that out and then the other piece that I talk about is how effective is it for students. And so looking at the OER research so I bring in OER research that has been done that shows that students who are taking courses that use OER instead of traditional textbooks are doing as well and sometimes better than students in traditional courses. So I think, you know, trying to balance that because it's a legitimate question to ask. Exactly. Matthew, I know you were unmuted. Did you want to follow up? Well, I have to say that OER really nailed it there. The only thing I mean that's pretty much what I was going to say about especially the peer review that goes into some of the work that OpenStacks and some of the other repositories do put into it. And I wanted to add as well that there is a student success component to considering open educational resources, especially if you're partnering with other faculty and your discipline to not necessarily completely rethink, but at least re-approach the way that you are providing the materials to your students. And here's what I guess the long story short is, you know, the process of re-approaching your curriculum and redesigning potentially some of your materials in order to find kind of the open access alternative to whatever you're using. That process oftentimes yields the discovery that there are unnecessary things happening in the classroom and that may be distracting from the actual competencies that you should be addressing. And so, you know, faculty, this is not just, you know, my own experience, but there are published articles about this out there as well where people go to redesign their curriculum to be OER or they adopt new OER and they align everything towards learning outcomes. And they discover that there were inconsistencies. Now, academic freedom is very important and we always want to protect that, but it may very well be that you discover that there is something in the traditional approach that has not been working. And the way that you discover that is by kind of pulling away at that access issue and looking at the materials that you're actually using. Looks like we lost Matthew, but I think he was wrapping up. James, did you want to add anything? Of course, yeah, Matthew and Luna certainly nailed it. I would also add, you know, our faculty, our academics, their scientists, they follow the data. So let's share with them the data, share with them the data that I think Matthew was getting ready to talk about from studies and programs all over the United States that show that when OER is utilized, it increases success increases, and it increases particularly amongst students from traditionally under-resourced populations. And so also add data from your students about hunger and homelessness. I hope for goodness sakes, your institutions are all collecting data about hunger and homelessness and barriers that your students encounter. Well, ask the students what they think about textbooks, and then drill down into the different populations. You know, which populations tell you that the cost of textbooks is a barrier. Which populations tell you that not seeing themselves reflected in the textbooks is a barrier to learning?  That's really helpful, James. Thank you. I'm going to take my privilege as the moderator and skip around a little bit. And Matthew, you talked about your emergency grant program and you talked about a bunch of staff at the Maricopa College System who support the implementation of OER. I think there's some questions around how institutions can get resources to create that type of programming. And so I'd love to open it up for you to talk a little bit about how colleges can think about resourcing both grants and staff. Well, that is that we are currently and have been for several years now extremely privileged in Maricopa to have buy-in from our district administration from our governing board and then all the way down to faculty. So the way that it started with Maricopa was faculty were on the ground in the classroom using open educational resources and kind of advocating for those things. And the district recognized that and found that it would and took kind of like made an investment and we were able to take the money that we were given. And it's a pretty big district. So, again, that there's the privilege of having access to those resources in the first place. But we were able to take that funding and quantify, at least in terms of an estimate, the actual cost savings or the cost savings that we estimate students were experiencing as a result of it. And so, while I can't tell you how to find money, if your institution doesn't have the funding to give faculty those things that there are some strategies, I would say, if you don't have the resources, embed open education into what's already there. Find support in the libraries, find support in the centers of teaching and learning, and you may find that people are actually willing when they start to understand the promise of open education. They may actually, you might not need extra money. It might just be a matter of reassigning time and re-prioritizing. But if you do have that funding, I think it's really, really important. If you have your administration, and then, you know, James's administrator, he's on here, I'm sure, he will support this. They want to know what, where's the proof that this is actually having an impact, right? So, if you, you know, one of the ways that we try to do that is we think, okay, well, there's X number of students on average in the given class, an average textbook costs certain amount, whatever. We multiply those two together, and then we multiply it by the number of sections in our system that are coded as either no cost or low cost resources. So we know that students are paying less than $40 for their course materials and most of those courses actually are zero cost. And we're able to kind of do that calculation and it's loose, it's an estimate, but it's pretty conservative for a number of reasons, which I'm happy to address separately. Now, but we estimate that our students since 2013 have probably saved about $20 million on course materials in our district. And so when we need to ask for money, and we say, hey, I need an extra, can I have an extra $50,000 this year to give a bunch of grants to faculty? I just have to quantify it and say, well, look, I mean, it just takes one faculty member to change their five classes to OER, and you've got like a $200,000 savings, you know, in one year because of all the students that that one decision to change can make. So I wouldn't say quantify it. And if you don't have the funding, see if there's a way that you can start to embed that culture in what already exists. It looks like we lost Matthew again. James, I know you wanted to follow up. Yeah, I agree with everything my friend Matthew said, I would just add, as the administrator here, there's always money. But budgets are a reflection of values. Your institution, my institution, we spend money left and right. What do we value? Do we value student success? Do we value culturally relevant pedagogy? Do we value inclusiveness? Let's invest our money in that. So as Matthew said, frame the OER initiative in terms of other things that are valued on campus and make those connections. Compelling argument, James. Now, Amy, I'm going to give you the last word and then we're going to close out. Okay, thanks. You know, just to weigh in and say that we're really looking at a certain time going forward in terms of funding at every level and, you know, it might get really competitive for funding for even something as important as making higher education more affordable and the kinds of really exciting outcomes that Matthew talked about, you know, $20 million in student savings is so awesome. And it feels so urgent to get those kinds of results. And what I've noticed is that sometimes it can take a really long time to see an impact. Somebody will take a workshop and then they'll approach me like three years later and say, I finally adopted and guess what my whole department did too, right? So I think that really knowing that we're in it for the long game and being prepared to start the conversations and start building a relationship to eventually see those results that we want to see in terms of student savings or student success. And, you know, it feels like there's a lot of urgency around work right now and there is, but it might not be results oriented immediately. So just wanted to put in that copy out there. So we're playing the short game and the long game. I think that's really why they need. Thank you so much and thank you everybody who joined us today. Thank you everyone for your questions and your comments. And we once again will post the PowerPoint online. You will be able to access all the links we will ask we will put a list of all the resources online and we will put a recording of the webinar itself online and we look forward to seeing you at future webinars. Thanks to all of our panelists for your wonderful wisdom.


Hello, my name is Todd Wyman. I work for the NDSU Extension Service. I'm a horticulture agent in Cass County. And today, we're going to be talking about building raised vegetable beds. Many times, people have wanted to have fresh vegetables. In order to do that, they've had to, in the past, put in large gardens or purchase them at a farmer's market or store. With what I'm going to show you today, you can build your own small version of a raised bed and produce the vegetables that you would like to do. With the rising cost of food and with everybody being very busy with work, it's hard to have a large garden. This garden will only be four feet by four feet and will have the advantages of good soil drainage, utilizing space that is otherwise taken up by rows, less watering, savings on fertilizer, and being able to reach out two feet from all directions for any type of weeding or harvesting and not compressing your soil by standing on it. The materials that we have today are as follows. The boards I've chosen are one inch by four feet by 12 inches. The drill is your standard drill, which many of you already have. You'll need a ruler. You'll need some type of tool for holding the bolts that you're going to be placing in this. A hammer will come in handy later, a pan or a pencil, brackets. The sizes of the brackets can vary to what you'd like. Today I've chosen to use three inch brackets with quarter inch holes. The eye bolts and the nuts and washers correspond with that. We many times have to do different things to protect our gardens from different types of little rabbits and birds. I have poles that will be attached to the garden and also netting for the birds and wire to keep out the rabbits. From the tools that I have here, it's easily seen that you don't need to have a lot of carpentry skills to make one of these. I should have no problem doing it, therefore you should have even less of a problem doing it. Well we're ready to start drilling our boards. The brackets, like I had said earlier, can be of different size. One thing to keep in mind though is to have them uniformly spaced seems to do the best job of making the the bed look nice. It doesn't have to be exact, but it should be uniform. Take your ruler, measure it, the desired length. You usually want to divide it into threes. You can do this if you like just to kind of flush it up a little bit. After you've marked your holes you'll begin drilling. Once you've done this to one end of all the four boards that you have we'll get the other boards, put the brackets in and line it up and then we'll drill the holes for those boards. Now that the holes have been drilled we'll take our bracket line it up with the holes we drilled. We'll start with the eye bolt put it on the outside of your garden. I've stuck it in on the inner hole just to make sure there's enough room. Add a little washer and a nut. Snug it up and you can tighten it later. One thing to keep in mind when you apply the other bolt without the eye on it is that it needs to not interfere with the bolt above it and as far as overlapping and interfering with each other. One way around that is to add a washer or two place that through the hole and you've lured it down. You can add another washer here add your nut then when you add your other bolt you won't have the problem of it hitting each other like you had earlier it should fit nicely and if not you can still add another washer to correct for that difference. Once you have the first bracket on you can put on your next one and then we'll continue on with the other four boards on the ends that haven't been drilled line it up with this mark our holes drill it and add our bolts. Now that you have your boards ready to be attached to each other we're going to mark them and attach them and certain things you'll want to keep in mind while you're doing this. What I'm trying to do here is lining up the boards so that they're flush on this end and I'll want to do that with all the boards to keep them uniform so they're flush here and while they're flush I will go inside and mark the holes on the board. After you've done that you're ready to drill the boards. We just got done drilling and now we're going to attach the boards to each other. What I'm doing here is lifting up the one board lining it up like we had when we marked it with the pen grabbing one of my eye bolts sliding it through one of the holes here and you don't need to make them very tight now just snug them up some so that as you're doing it you have a little leeway in getting the boards holes lined up with the bracket. Next we're adding the other bolt as you can see there's plenty of room between here for me to get my bolt in there and my nut and my washer and I'm not I'm just going to slightly snug them up I'm not going to make them really tight because we do have to attach the other boards and if there's a little play in in this it'll be a lot easier to do it and when you're done you can you can snug them up fairly tight. Let's get the other boards. The boards have been attached and everything should be ready for our next step one thing to keep in mind as you notice it's not perfectly square some of the boards were a little warped and they didn't line up exactly right it's not a problem for the situation we are using this as a as a vegetable garden and if we were wanting to make it more exact we could but for what we're doing this should complete the purpose that we want. The next step is to add the string that will mark off the barrier saying that I'm going to make this into a square foot type of a garden where each foot is utilized by a plant or series of plants and for that I'm going to need string nails hammer and a ruler. My goal is to when I'm done have 16 one foot by one foot squares each side should have nails that will accommodate this. I've measured out a foot here just tap it in a little bit if you're going to do this what I would recommend is waiting for this step until you have soil ready and you're ready to place this outside and then place your soil and then do this so you can plant right away and not have to redo this step. I'm going to attach the string to one of the nails that I made I'd pound it in and weave it through on one side take a scissors cut it we were through the other side and we get a nice 16 block area in which we will plant our different plants and later. I like to wrap it once or maybe twice around the nail. Keep it snug but you don't have to pull very hard on it since we didn't pound the nails in. As you can see we have 16 areas or squares each of these areas in theory could grow a different vegetable or vegetables you like according to appropriate spacing. A good book to look at is by Mel Bartholomew called Square Foot Gardening that goes through the different processes of this method that we're going to incorporate. Our next step is to put up rabbit protection followed by bird protection. These are the eye bolts that we had placed earlier and also with support of the bracket the purpose of them is to hold our stakes that we're going to use for rabbit protection wire and also bird netting. You would not need to go oh I would say three feet into the ground like we have here you can go as deep as you want but I would say a good foot should be quite adequate to cause some stabilization. Also make sure you call before you dig in order that you don't hit any wires or other buried objects in your in your ground. Now that all the poles are in place we'll want to do is add some type of rabbit barrier and I've chosen some chicken wire which is easily available in many different hardware stores. What I'm going to do is weave oh maybe every three or four holes doesn't have to be exact every other pole starting with the first pole going around the second pole weaving and going around until I've come back to my beginning spot. So every three or four staying in line sliding into the eye bolts that we have already in place. Now that we've come to where we've started we can match it up wire together nicely cut off the remaining amount or if you don't want to do that I want to keep it all together you can just double it up and and go around until you run out and then attach it. Many times birds will grace your garden once the the fruits and vegetables are ripe and it's not a bad idea that once you start to notice that or even before get some bird netting there's several types out there take the bird netting and what I do is since you've got these here already I like to overlap it a little bit here find the end of it go out a little bit more than it is on this side and just drape it down go to your other end and overlap that as well. It doesn't have to be too tight but it does need to be tight enough so that the birds are not tempted to try to get in there drape your netting over have it wider than than you need on this side wider than you need on this side and you're set adequate sunlight rain air movement all still there but with the added protection of some wire and some netting to keep out the little creatures that could destroy your garden in no time at all well we've completed our project here as you can see it's it's something that doesn't take up a lot of space and I think you'll be very happy with with the results of it one thing to keep in mind is that we used pine wood the boards here will more than likely rot in four or five years and if that's something that you don't mind or wouldn't mind building again or even moving it to another location that's something to consider if you're looking for a more longer lasting type of a product I would go with cedar wood however the cost is considerably more we've done this inside all in one stage and our next phase will be actually implementing this with soil planting seeds planting vegetables and plants and that will be outdoors