Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this lecture we are going to talk about distances of the stars and the method to determine them used known as spectroscopic parallax. So we'll look at various methods to be able to determine the distances to stars in the universe. So let's start off looking at this, and what we mean by spectroscopic parallax is using the HR diagram to determine distances. Can we use the spectral class of a star to determine distance? Remember the spectral class only depends on the spectrum. So as long as the star is bright enough that we can see a spectrum, this is good because it is then easy to measure. However, the different thing we have to consider is that stars of a spectral class can have various luminosities and that you can have a star such as a type, say, right here, and it can be a main sequence star, luminosity class 5, it could be a giant star, luminosity class 3, or it could be a super-giant star of luminosity class 1. So we need to be able to determine the two-dimensional spectral class, not only the OBAFGKM class, but also the Roman numeral 1 through 5 class to be able to determine. So for example, our sun is a G25 star. Another G2 star could be a giant, class 3. It would be much brighter, and that could cause our distance measurements to be off if we are not careful. So we need to look at both of these when we are measuring distances. So what do we do with spectroscopic parallax? So first of all, nothing to do with parallax at all, except that it's used to measure distance. What we do is measure the spectral class and the luminosity class of a star. That allows us to say we've classified this as a certain type of spectral class here, and we've said that it's a luminosity class that's here, and that allows us to get the luminosity. So we can then use the HR diagram to determine the luminosity and then just like other methods, use the inverse square law to get the distance. So we can then determine the distance to the star. Again, it needs to be calibrated. This is a running theme throughout what we're looking at here by stars of known distance. We have to calibrate exactly where the main sequence falls, and we have to calibrate exactly where the giant branch falls, and you can see that as you get up to super giants, it gets really hard to be able to match those up. But once you do that, you can then use this method to determine distances to the stars. So we then look at what we call our cosmic distance ladder, and that is because no distance measurement will work for all stars. Some stars are close enough that we can use parallax, and with Gaia that is expanding to be able to use more of those. Some stars are C-feeds or are our Lyrae stars. Sometimes we can use spectroscopic parallax. But we have to remember that variable stars and spectroscopic parallax are indirect. That means they have to be calibrated before they are used. The parallax allows us to determine the distances directly. So as we work with parallax here and we see the image, and here's the Sun and there's our Earth, that we can use a parallel, had an old parallax limit way in here, very close to Earth. Now with Gaia we've got a much larger parallax method, which allows us to better calibrate things like C-feeds and our Lyrae stars. So we can get these better calibrated to be able to determine distances. Then we use those two galaxies that might have C-feeds in them, and we can use that to determine distances to galaxies. And then we will need to use other methods we will talk about later to determine distances of much more distant galaxies. So we're going to need new methods to determine distances to most of the galaxies. The methods we've used here work great within our galaxy. They'll work with nearby galaxies, but we're going to need others to get to further galaxies. So what we look is that all measurements, remember every measurement we make has some kind of error associated with it. If we measure a star at 100 light years with an error of 10%, then we would say it is in between 90 and 110 light years away. As we go up the distance ladder, each step builds on the previous step, and therefore the errors tend to increase. So parallax works out to about 30,000 years once Gaia mission is complete. Our Lyrae stars visible out to 300,000 light years. Spectroscopic parallax to a little over a million light years. And C-feeds out to about 60 million light years. And that sounds like an amazing distance. However, we're going to be talking about billions of light years. And we're not even getting close to one billion light years, which is more than 10 times the distance that a C-feed can be used to measure this. And the edge of the galaxy, we're getting out to 10 billion light years, or more. So we're actually going to need many other methods to be able to help us measure the distances to the galaxies. So let's go ahead and finish up this with our summary. We talked about how we can use the HR diagram to determine luminosities, and therefore distances of the stars. We have what we need to know is the spectral class and the luminosity class. It's a two-dimensional spectral classification in order to determine this. And then we started talking about the cosmic distance ladder, as the steps used to determine those distances, but each step is built on the previous one, causing the errors to increase as well. So we need very accurate measurements in the very beginning steps to make sure we do not have tremendous errors in the later steps. So that concludes this lecture on distances to the stars, spectroscopic parallax. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.


Hi, I'm Jason Arshaver, and today I want to take you on a tour of what's new in the Azure 2.8 SDK and some of the exciting new features available to you. We'll be taking a look at new Azure RM deployment features, making it easier than ever to deploy your Azure templates, leveraging the power of application insights to troubleshoot cloud application startup and recycle issues, easy Docker scaffolding with Yo Docker, and introduce our new cross-platform Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer tool. Let's dive right in. We've made some improvements to Azure RM deployments to make them more reliable. To show you this, I'm going to go New Project, Azure Resource Group, Microsoft Virtual Machines, and it creates our new project. First, let's take a look at the scripts. The first thing you notice is that we've added new require modules to the top of the script. This adds support for the new Azure RM Command Lits. Let's take a look at one of those. The Test Azure RM Resource Group Deployment Command Lits is a new quick and easy way to test your templates and parameters files to make sure that your deployments are successful. Let's take a quick look at the templates and see some new features there. We're going to scroll down to New Storage Account Name. What many people find is when they deploy their template, it works great the first time and deploy it again, and there's a name collision. What we're going to do is we're going to concatenate the existing New Storage Account Name with unique string. I'm going to pass in the resource group and get an ID value for it. This will ensure that this name parameter gets a unique value for that resource group. Of course, you can deploy using the Azure RM deployment dialog. Let's take a look at some of our Azure Diagnostic improvements. We've added the ability to automatically send environment and application logs, traces, and events to application insights. To show you this, we're going to take a look at the Contoso ads cloud service project. If you double click on your worker role, you'll be taken to the Azure configuration screen and you'll see this checkbox send diagnostics data to application insights. When you select this, you'll begin with the opportunity to pick which application insights instance you wish it to send to. We're going to select Contoso ads for this case. Then you click OK and save all. Here we are at the application insights instance for the Contoso ads project. We want to diagnose why our worker role is failing. There are two ways to do this. One, you can click search and look through your events and you'll see some errors available to you here. Another option for troubleshooting difficult problems is you can create favorite searches, like I've created one for worker role startup issues, that are built to find these specific events. Taking a look at one of these events, you'll see that we have all of your stack trace information available to you, as well as access to other related telemetry events. This makes it easier than ever to identify why worker roles are recycling or failing and fix them. In addition to these new features available in the SDK, I'd like to show you two more Azure tools we've introduced recently to add to your tool chest. First, we've been continuing our support of Docker and Azure together with our new Yalmin generator Yo Docker. This generator creates a Docker file and a script to help you build and run your ASP.NET 5, Go, or Node.js application inside a Docker container. Scripts can be generated as bash or batch files with PowerShell coming soon. We've made a significant revision of our storage tools with our Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. This new free standalone tool allows you to log in with your Microsoft account, organizational account including support for two-factor authentication, or with a direct storage account name and key, and browse all of your storage accounts in one place. The new Azure Storage Explorer currently supports both Classic and the newer Azure RM storage accounts. We've heard your feedback and focused on providing a small, lightweight as an X copy deployable application for both Windows and OS X. This is a preview project and is focused on providing functionality for blobs with only limited support for tables and queues. But give us your feedback because we have more in store for the future. Consider taking the Azure Storage Explorer currently in preview for a spin and let us know what you think. Everything you've seen in this video can be downloaded from our website on azure.com. We have great walk-throughs and tutorials on documentation site, and while you're there, you can visit the Azure blog for more in-depth articles from the team or just to stay up to date on the newest developments in Azure. My name is Jason R. Shaver, and I thank you for joining me.


Hello everyone. This is Una Daly again, the Director of the Community College Consortium for OER and I want to welcome you to our December webinar on the impact of OER adoption on cost outcomes and stakeholder presentation perceptions. Excuse me. And this is our last webinar for the calendar year 2018 and we're very glad that you could join us for this and I imagine that many of you have joined us for our other monthly webinars. Very quickly these webinars are recorded and we share those on our home page. So if you want to go back and check on something or if you have colleagues who couldn't attend today we usually have these posted within 48 hours with the slides as well. We do send it out for captioning. All right. So I'm very excited to have this particular webinar on research findings from both American University which is a university back in Washington DC, a private university. David will correct me if that's wrong, but actually quite a select university and there was research done there on how textbook costs impact that demographic. And then secondly we will hear from Regina Gong at Lansing Community College on what's been happening the last three years of OER adoption at her college, how that's affecting student outcomes, retention and other data. So both really great findings for our community to be aware of. So at this point I want to give David and Regina a moment to say hello to everyone before we get into the main part of this. So David would you like to say hello to everyone? David is the online learning trainer and curriculum designer at American University in Washington DC. Yeah thanks, you know. Hi everyone. So that's my I guess official title instructional designers basically what I do on a day-to-day basis. I currently work at AU's Law School. I used to be at our Center for Teaching Research and Learning up until about six months ago where I ran our open education program there. So we had small stipends that we would give out to faculty to encourage OER adoption. And so the research findings that I'll be presenting today are kind of like the precursor to that. When the program was first getting started we were trying to just gather student data about textbook buying habits. So I look forward to talking about that soon. Thank you for joining us today David. And next up is Regina Gong who is a long time presenter with us at CCC OER. She's on our Executive Council as well as her day job where she is a librarian and the OER project manager at Lansing Community College. Regina? Thank you Una and thank you David. Welcome everyone and I'm you know happy to be here and talk about the research that I've done. We do guards to OER here at LCC. So thank you. Wonderful. Thank you Regina. And thank you to all of you who've been introducing yourself in the chat window. And we have quite a nice set of folks from around the country. I see just about all corners of the country are covered here. And if you haven't had a chance please do introduce yourself in the chat window if you'd like to. We love to see who's attending. And before we get started with the main presentation I'm just going to go through my usual little marketing slides. The Community College Consortium for OER has been around now for 11 years. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary last year actually. And our mission remains largely the same as when we were founded. It's expanding awareness and access to open educational resources. We are a community of practice for open education. And so we're all about supporting faculty choice and development which is what these webinars are about. But ultimately our goal is student success. And I know that both of our speakers are going to address that today and how OER can help with that. So I want to just to show you our membership map. If you're not on here we'd love to have you. We have now 75 members in 32 states. Grace and Community College in Denison, Texas. Texas just joined us this month. And so we're excited to have them with us as well. And 11 of those memberships are statewide memberships. So today we are going to hear from the two from David and Regina about student impact. The impact of textbook costs on students from a financial perspective. Also how it affects their behavior. What classes do they choose to take or not take and how that might affect their completion rates. Regina is going to go into more detail about student learning outcomes. I think you'll be really excited to see her data where they're able to compare how students did the previous year with the same instructors using commercial textbooks versus how students did the following year same instructor but with OER textbooks. And she also has information about retention. So really some some great data from Regina and David. And I think I'm not sure if this was mentioned but both Regina and David were open ed group fellows in the 2017-18 years. And David's data has been published in a journal article and Regina's will be soon. So with no further ado I'd like to turn this over to to David Rose from American University. Great. So I'm gonna share my screen. Perfect. We can see it. Okay. Great. Oops. Sorry. Let me just set up my notes here too. Okay. Great. So like I've already introduced myself. Again my name is David Rose. I'm at American University which is a private school as I'm going to mention. I had this research as part of the Open Ed Group Research Fellowship and I'm also working with the Open Textbook Network as a bootcamp instructor our OER certificate program which we are starting early 2019. So maybe some of you are in that which would be great. So the survey that we developed was like I mentioned to get a better sense of the pervasiveness of textbook buying habits or lack thereof at AU and the general idea which I'll get into more was that OER research has largely been focused at state schools and community colleges and the findings that support OER research that say students aren't buying textbooks with that same concept hold true at a private school that's much more expensive. So the short answer no. I will get into more details but private schools are not exempt from student concerned about textbook buying habits and that's it. So thank you for having me and I and I'll be on my way. That's obviously a joke. So all right. So a little bit of background. The Open American program is what our OER grant program is called at AU and it started in about 2013 and like I mentioned the idea was to kind of get some some solid data that we can use to support why we're funding this and about 10 years ago the financial aid model at AU changed to be largely merit-based to be more need-based. So it changed from about 70 percent merit-based awarding to 70 percent need-based rewarding and so that didn't change the economic or didn't change the the academic profile of our incoming students but it did change the economic profile quite a bit as you might expect and so with that came students into this very expensive private school in a very expensive city that started to voice concerns about affordability and textbook buying habits and so the Center for Teaching Research and Learning where I used to work decided to allocate a small portion of their budget to support OER adoption which has been proven through research largely out of this open ed group fellowship to be a solution to student affordability issues and I before I go any further I should mention that my co-researcher and author in this paper is Lindsay Murphy who is pictured here she currently works at Portland State University and she was actually my predecessor to leading the open American program in the Center for Teaching Research and Learning and it was actually her that was the one at AU at the time the survey was administered so she deserves the lion share of credit for this it just so happens that I'm the one that still currently works at AU so yeah we wrote the paper together and if you are in the Portland area she definitely grew up so a little bit of more background on the AU student demographics these the national averages are from College Board and NCES and I have links to the specific places that I found them that will be in the slides once this gets distributed after the webinar is over so if you want to double check these numbers please do because I think as we're all aware these numbers are sometimes kind of not consistent so anyways this is in 2015 when the survey was administered again students receiving need-based financial aid is roughly the same at AU as national the two that concert that are find most interesting is the discrepancy in the last two between 52% of AU students use the loans to pay for their education versus 34 nationally and about 18% of our students for Pell eligible versus 34 nationally so I'm sure a lot of you are much smarter can read into this I don't know exactly what that means but I guess my best guess would be that you know a lot of our students maybe didn't make the cut for Pell eligible but even though you don't meet that demarcation college is still very unaffordable for I guess the quote-unquote middle class who would it normally be considered in the Pell eligible financially needy group so just a little bit of background on our students and as I mentioned this was recently published in open praxis in the latest issue there's a bitly link here if you want to go to it directly or you can just Google open praxis and find the latest issue and Lindsay and I's paper will be there so the findings that I'll be presenting now will be all from this paper but if you want to read the whole thing which I encourage you to do please go check it out okay so in Regina's study which you'll hear in a second you know like she has control groups and it's very much more scientific than what we did and so our methodology are very unscientific methodology so in fall 2015 we surveyed 13 courses across undergraduate levels textbook prices varied and the courses that we identified it wasn't in any kind of research rigorous method it was just kind of courses and professors that we had access to that were willing to distribute our surveys as students were incentivized with two $25 gift cards and the method of survey capture was dependent on the professor so they either did it in person in class or they just emailed them a link it varied and so in the end we had about 110 responses which was about 30% response rate for all the students that received the survey in one form or another so as I mentioned our main research question was there are about four million private school students across the country this represents about 20% of higher education and so there's you know a ton of research that shows that students don't buy textbooks and that OER is a potential solution to that but this research as I mentioned has been largely focused at public universities and at AU there is a general perception less so amongst faculty but to a greater extent among administration that you know that's not a problem here type of thought you know these are students that have a cost of attendance of about $60,000 a year which includes tuition, room board, books and supplies so all in about $60,000 and tuition is you know 45 to 50 of that and so the survey is largely over sorry excuse me the research existing research is largely overlooking this 20% of students and so can we kind of fill in a gap there was our primary research question so I am curious you don't have to type in the chat you can if you want but I'll stop talking for about 20 seconds and if you just want to read over these little quizzes and just think to yourself what you think the answer might be here I think our audience is pretty advanced in OER so you might know these things might be easy all right so from 1977 to 2015 textbook prices rose by over a thousand percent and that number is over three times the rate of inflation and this is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics I've seen this quoted as three to four times in different places but just generally I guess the College Board estimates that in 2017-18 undergraduates could expect to pay almost $1,200 for books and supplies alone and roughly two-thirds of students don't purchase required textbooks due to cost concerns and so that two-thirds of students is kind of the the main number that we were looking at this number has been repeated in a number of different sources which I'll go through fairly quickly here the largest one which I'm sure most of you have heard of is Florida Virtual Campus they've done this survey three different times the most recent being in 2016 they had over 20,000 students respond 67% or two-thirds have not purchased a required textbook because of cost again Florida Virtual Campus in 2012 64% Florida Virtual Campus in 2010 65% student purgs have done a number of surveys measuring the same thing and they found that 65% of students in 2014 didn't purchase a required textbook due to costs student purgs in 2011 70% of students so that's that's that's what we were working with right that's what all the existing research said and again four other million time or repeated that you know the focus of this survey was that this largely did not take into account private schools so another quick 10-second pause just think to yourself compared to these all these numbers what would you expect a student textbook buying habits did students buy textbooks more often less often or roughly the same all right we got a few few same guesses I'm sure that's probably what most people are thinking and the big reveal yes so like kind of weirdly shocking the exact same two-thirds number 67% of students at American University in the fall 2015 reported that they had not bought a required textbook at one point or another because it was too expensive and if you just think remember back to that little guessing game that we just did the College Board had also estimated that they expect students to be spending about $1,200 per year on textbooks that was not true at AU students have spent about half of that and this number our 577 600 ish number that has also been found in other surveys as well the Florida virtual campus survey again 2016 found roughly the same thing and then another researcher Hill in 2015 found a similar number so again just showing that and that that College Board number is coming from schools self-reporting what what they project students to be spending on their required textbooks so the point being students aren't buying them all right so again getting to a little bit more of the specifics of our findings we had so there's a perception of value that seems to become pretty apparent so we ask students in general when you prepare for test or exams what percentage of studying do you vote to each of the following and the dark gray box on the right is textbooks and as you can see that was their least favorite method of preparing or studying and so generally there's or you know there's certainly some kind of value assessment going on so specific quotes which I'll show some in a second but specific quotes you know students said professors either don't test or rarely test on textbook material if they do it'll only be information discussed in class students said some courses require expensive textbooks that you use and frequently so students are making value judgments and these value judgments are learned behavior so these are some these are some quotes from students that kind of imply some some temporal time passage right like they maybe used to buy books but they have learned pretty quickly throughout their their studies that it's not required so specifically when analyzing responses by academic year only 32% of freshmen reported that they decided not to buy a required textbook while 75% of sophomores juniors and seniors reported doing so and again that's this is just a visual representation of those numbers much greater percentage of upperclassmen are not buying prior textbooks because they are learning it is not needed and so this is when we imported the survey data into Qualtrics we kind of we tried to tag the free response questions as best as we could and you can kind of see the major themes with this chart that arise obviously too expensive don't buy not use those are the big ones the the two that I find really interesting I mean obviously the third from the bottom illegal downloads is a pretty big concern that's been you know talked about elsewhere that not only are students not buying textbooks but indirectly you know we could be encouraging illegal behavior by having students buying illegal PDFs elsewhere but the two that I think are really interesting are you know there's personal privilege at 6.9% and family help at 3.5 so even students who did buy textbooks because they could I just think it's interesting that they're even students who are recognizing that they are coming from place of you know relative privilege over their peers are still acknowledging that textbooks are prohibitive to some and here's more quotes just students diving deeper that they're acknowledging that not buying the book is having a negative consequence on their learning so students are saying you know I find type highlighting beneficial but I still choose to rent rather than buy just because it's too expensive so just some quotes that we pulled here and again just more quotes just because I find that really persuasive kind of paints the story of what these students are going through so again students from a $50,000 a year school for tuition people are saying you know this one right in the middle I don't make enough to spend it all on textbooks our findings I don't think I have a slide in here but our findings did show that students who spent less on textbooks worked more and I don't know if you can make a direct correlation there but you know could certainly imply that you know students who have to work more hours feel you know more cost-constrained that would make a lot of sense talking about stress takes away from other needs like food and rents and then particularly these ones in the bottom that say I try to stay away from courses that I know require very expensive textbooks or that first one that says I know people who have dropped out of classes because the book was too expensive and then so this is getting into larger concerns right that administration would be probably very concerned to hear if this was pervasive and systematic so in in summation I suppose going back to my spoiler from the from the very first slide our private schools exempt from student concerns about textbooks costs no our results were consistent with results found at public four and two year universities and findings from those universities have you know demonstrated that textbooks are prohibitive for a lot of students and that OER or low cost textbook programs are very viable solution to that so that same that same connection could I think very easily be made at private universities as well and like I mentioned the open American program did start at AU in 2013 so it's been going for about five years now when I left in April to come to the law school we had saved students over five hundred thousand dollars in textbooks from our efforts there with the stipends to encourage faculty to adopt even if there was no future adoptions since I left we probably would have reached a million dollars in student savings probably sometime in 2019 don't quote me on that because I'm not at the program anymore so I can't give you specific numbers so yeah and so you know students at AU resorted to the same coping mechanisms that students at community colleges and other low-cost institutions these coping mechanisms included not purchasing all required texts relying instead on course reserves illegal downloads or never referencing the text at all our study also suggests that the academic value of textbooks may be misaligned to the high price of textbooks and that students experience negative learning effects stemming from those high prices so in terms of future research one of our key things that we want to look at whether it's us or you know some other private institution that wants to follow up on this it just has the inability or refusal to purchase textbooks by AU students also led to an inability inability to enroll in courses they need as part of their degree program has time to degree completion been affected or even something more benign like student satisfaction in their degree program as a result of non-ideal courses due to textbook costs so this chart that you're seeing is comparing the Florida virtual campus surveys and what we talked about what I just talked about was that first line right that was kind of our big number of the students not buying textbook costs but the following through taking fewer courses not registering for a specific course obviously that has been demonstrated at public universities with the same old true at private that would be something I would be interested in finding out because that's a you know maybe a fairly persuasive bargaining chip for administration when you start talking about revenue to the school being affected and so the last thing I want to leave you with is just this quote Stein and her colleagues I believe they're from New Zealand and we read their report as we were writing ours last year and it was just really helpful to us and kind of framing that they had a very similar approach to their their research and the quote is just as you can see textbooks may be developing into a systematic barrier to student learning and it's all of our jobs right that are here that care about OER that care about student success to not let it be and just to thank to the open ed group fellowship which when I mentioned Regina and I were a part of the 2017 18th cohort it's a super great group if you have any interest in all I really encourage it and to the open textbook network which AU is a part of they have also been extremely beneficial in everything that we're doing at a school so I also cannot recommend them more as well is it for my section thank you David that was that was wonderful and I just was made aware of that we have a couple of students in our audience today which is wonderful we don't always get students we have students present with us once in a while and I wonder if Mel or Kazoo wanted to say hi and if you we could give you a minute or two just to say if what David has reported on seems like it's the same at your community college in Oregon I'm putting them on the spot because I didn't know they would be here today yeah I think we can hear you yes okay um yes me and Mel our students at Malhead Community College located in Gresham, Oregon I I mean yes a lot of his information was definitely accurate especially with students being not being able to take classes especially because of textbook prices one of the major issues at our school is a lot of our science classes have very expensive textbooks so a lot of students cannot find an alternate to it and yeah I mean thank you for sharing that yeah thank you thank you and David there was a few comments in the chat window from many were from Rich Hirschman and I want to say welcome Rich who is here from the National Association of Bookstores and is a active participant participant on our community email list as well and I didn't know if you wanted to address any of those comments or you can also do that in the chat window as well David okay sorry I haven't looked at that the chat window yeah just take your time on that because Rich had a lot of good information about how statistics are gathered by the bookstores as well and by various organizations so you can address that in the chat window we can come back to it at the end sure great and I think it if if there aren't any further questions I didn't see any other specific questions for David we will move on to Regina's presentation and then we'll come back at the end and have time for Q&A for for both our presenters so Regina you can go ahead and share your screen now okay let me just there we go okay how's that perfect and thank you David great presentation and thank you Regina thank you thank you and thank you David that was really you know an illuminating research that that you've done at AU so just a bit of a context where I am situated right now I as I've said earlier I am a librarian and I manage our OER project here at LCC so we've started our OER project in 2015 so we are on our third year now of doing OER and when we started in fall 2015 we did not provide any grants or stipends for our faculty and it was only last year last fall when we got that half a million dollar allocation from our Board of Trustees and I have been managing that and we've been using that to support our faculty in the form of OER award so our goals in terms of our OER initiative at LCC are twofold so one is for our students to help them to help eliminate the barrier of textbook costs and as we saw textbook cost is really a barrier for students whether you work or whether you are enrolled in community college or a private university such as AU American University and another goal of our OER initiative is for our faculty so that they can explore new ways of delivering their courses and also to improve their teaching and pedagogy through the use of OER so this is just the numbers that we have so far so as you can see we have been progressing in terms of the numbers in our OER adoption so for fall we really shoot up in terms of the number of courses and sections that are using OER and so far we have saved 2.2 billion dollars for our students but as you know savings is not although it is important there must be more to OER than just cost savings and that is the question that we are trying to find out here at LCC so and that's the reason why I have done this research on OER so the question that we really want to to be answered is that how do we are contribute to student success and ultimately we want to know whether they are effective and do they help our students learn and I just want to mention that like David I also have a co-author for this research I am co-authoring it with our director for assessment here at LCC she works at our Center for Data Science and she's Dr. Karen Hicks so unfortunately she's unable to be with us today but I just would like to acknowledge her help in doing this research so as you know most of the OER efficacy studies out there particularly those that were conducted by our fellow OER research group fellows show that students assigned an OER have lower withdrawal and drop rates and are more likely to pass with a C or better grade and in addition they have higher persistence and retention rate so you see I would like to know this you know do these findings hold true for us here at the community college and so just a bit of a background regarding our study so we are focusing on this three high enrollment large courses here at LCC so we are focusing on Psyc 200 econ 201 and econ 202 why because all sections of these courses adopted on OER all sections all faculty teaching the course and they did so in fall 2016 so more background about our study so what we did was we compared publisher textbook use for academic year 2016 versus open smoke use for the next semester which is academic year 2016 to 2017 actually a full academic year so what we did was we eliminated the confounding variable of the instructor so what this means is that there is a one-on-one comparison of faculty teaching the course before OER and using an OER so only faculty who taught in the semesters prior to OER and who taught using an open textbook our track so there's this one-to-one correspondence between the faculty teaching those courses and this is just a brief summary of our study population so our control group and OER and our treatment is OER course and we have 92 faculty in 239 sections and our end is 6,602 so we have a number of data collection strategies I do a student feedback survey every semester and we have a rich data for that we also do faculty surveys of OER usage and we employ a mixed method quantitative and qualitative study and as I mentioned we got the data for the student grades with Royal drop incomplete rates from our Center for Data Science which also acts as our institutional review board and they got that data from Banner and Argos so the research is largely based on the cool framework because we are an open-ed research fellow that is the framework that we use when we study efficacy of OER usage so it stands for cost outcomes use and perception and this study does all the four framework so in terms of cost these are the research questions that we were trying to find out so how much money did our students save with using an open textbook and how much money did they report as spending for these three courses and then in terms of outcomes we hold in on student grades course with roll rate persistence rate and retention rate so we compare the pre and the OER use so in terms of usage this are the questions that we were trying to find out in this research paper so this corresponds to the questions that we have in our students feedback survey and then for perceptions we we wanted to find out how our students perceive perceive the quality of the open textbook so a note here is that we only use students perception we did not use faculty perception just because we're semesters when we did that have data for that so that's why we did not include that so in terms of a research result in terms of cost yes our students saved a lot with not having to buy the textbook because now they're using an OER and as far as the question on the typical amount that our students spend on textbooks each semester it usually range from 100 to 300 so that's where most of the responses where I mean it it it may look small just because again our students are not buying textbooks so this this is really the finding that I would like to highlight I understand this is heavily you know figure-laden and I mean I'll explain it in in a little while but the thing that I'd like you to look at is the column where it says significance so P is actually the significance indicator it tells us how reliable this is or you know something that to tell us that we saw did not happen by chance so it tells us how sure we are that a difference or relationship exists between OER and student outcomes so a P that is above point zero five is an indicator that there is not a difference or a significant difference in student outcomes when comparing courses using an OER and courses that are using a publisher textbook so in short there's no significant difference in terms of the rates when comparing the academic year 2015 to 2016 where these courses were using a publisher textbook academic year 2016 to 2017 when these courses and we're now using OER so for the course grades again it's the same so the P is less than point zero five there is no statistical of significant difference in terms of the rates when when course grades are taken into account that's also the same with persistence and retention so retention is actually the number of students or the percentage of students that are returning from fall to fall and persistence is from fall to spring so in terms of OER use by number of faculty and number of students these are the number of faculty that we're using OER and the sections that we're using OER there is a question in our survey asking what is your intent to register for a course that uses an open textbook and of course our students say they are more likely to enroll in courses that are using OER and if there's a choice between a course that is using an open textbook or a section that is using an open textbook and a section that is not using OER then of course our students say they will enroll in courses OER so this data here pertains to students perceptions on the quality of the open textbook and majority of them say that it's the same or better than traditional textbook or and and then some say that it's better than the traditional textbook so very small percentage say that it's quality is worse than the traditional so to summarize our recent analysis that looked at the two years as you can as you have seen demonstrated that there's no significance between OER courses and those courses that were using publisher textbook in terms of student success metrics so the only rate that we are seeing is a higher average in college retention so we have seen 1.5 higher retention rate in in our two-year analysis but as what Karen will tell you who's the director of our assessment here at LCC it is we cannot really make that you know definitive relationship that there is really a significant difference unless we do longitudinal data so I suspect if we analyze so we now have about three academic years of OER usage if we do that and include all courses not just these three courses we probably could see a significant difference in favor of OER so this is another thing that I it was it was just really an aha moment for me because as you can see this is our fall 2018 enrollment data and as you can see our enrollment here at LCC is going down significantly we used to be the third community college in Michigan in terms of enrollment but now we have gone down to the fifth in terms of of enrollment number of students enrolled but if you can see the the ampers head counts for fall 2018 the unduplicated one and if you compare the number of students that are enrolled this semester in our OER courses 37% of our students currently enrolled in fall 2018 are taking OER courses and that is insignificant and I am predicting that by spring or certainly by fall 2019 we will be closer to our target of 50% of our students enrolled. LCC will be enrolled in courses using OER so again this is a forthcoming paper we hope that this will be published soon and I'm carrying this my co-author as I mentioned yeah and this is the last slide and if you have questions just send me an email or I'd be happy to answer it if you have one during this webinar thank you. Thank you Rich. That was great. We did have a few questions in the chat window one was from Rich Hirshman he asked are these all open stacks textbooks? Say that again because I was reading. So are they open stacks textbooks or are they general OER? Yeah those are all open stacks so our e-con 201 are using open stacks as well as our site 200. Okay great and Amy Hoffer had a question she said in her in her reading most studies don't cover the entire coop framework they take certain elements is and so she was wondering if that was unusual or. Amy not really unusual. Harder to cover the entire coop framework but the one that I have right now out of memory just because I I'm it's all fresh in my mind is a study by Christina Hendricks where they also did the coop framework except their end is a little smaller than us there's also one study by Virginia Clinton I think it was published just this year that to be the coop framework but what I see is that it's a little smaller than what we have and certainly most of the studies that I see focus on just one semester versus here so I think that is where the uniqueness of our study lies. Great and Rich had another question about your baseline cost number let's see what was the baseline cost number to determine savings new book or a different one. Actually Rich I do do calculations so I am making the assumption that our students purchase the new edition of a textbook so based on the assumption that the students buy the new edition of the textbook and then I have another figure that uses the $100 multiplier and the cost of the new textbook is based from what our bookstore pricing is and we have a third-party bookstore it's MBS direct. So on that same line Rich had another clarification on that he said are the professors using off-the-shelf open stacks or are they using customized versions of those materials. Okay so for econ 201202 they adopted what open stacks offers for our site 200 it's the same but for our sociology and for our math courses they are actually now revising the open open stacks textbook. Great and had another question from Amy on is your administration responsive to your enrollment retention related findings. I have not really presented this yet to them but I I'm sure they will be although I'm expecting that they'll probably ask the question of if there's no difference then it means that it's not successful right and then I have one of the questions that I've received when I did the same presentation at open ed this year was if you if you if you're findings show that there's no difference then how can I sell this to our administration and my answer was well still a win because think about it if our students were paying $150 for an e-context book and now they are not paying anything because of all we are and the results are the same then what is that hundred dollars so I think it's a win-win even if there's no statistical significance or difference. Thank you and we had a question not necessarily directly for you Regina but just in general from Makayla Willie Hooper and even David or anyone in the audience could answer this she asked if there's any research that on faculty created materials either a course versus open stacks and then where a print copy is readily available versus just online only so she's looking for research along that those lines. I don't know of any but what we do here at LCC is that we do not want to disadvantage our students who prefer to use the print you know like I've mentioned since fall 2015 we've been doing OER feedback research and it's consistent consistent across semesters when we ask our students do you print materials even chapters even like the full book what they say is that I mean the results indicate that only 10% of our students print but again we provide avenues for them to be able to do that so we do a print-on-demand service familiar familiar with Lulu. So you you provide a print-on-demand a PDF of the open stacks textbooks for students. Yes yes so if you decide buy open stacks you know Amazon it's it's hardbound holler $35 depending on on the textbook I think the most expensive textbook for open stacks is like $55. Wonderful. I was just gonna jump in and say I also haven't heard anything like that like Michaela is suggesting but the one question that I would have is you know to try and limit like confounding variables it seems like you would ideally want to have the same instructor in the same semester teaching with open stacks versus a more customized version but then a follow-up question if anyone were to do this which I think it's a good idea you know I think oftentimes we are unintentionally equating OER with just more thoughtful teaching methods right like if a survey result comes back that students outcomes improved when they're using OER how do we know that's because of the OER or it's just because that professor was for once in maybe 10 years being more thoughtful in how they're delivering their course material or or anything like that you know so that would just be my my question of how to make sure that's not being represented in in this survey about or this research for if it were to happen yeah thanks for that David and it is very hard to tease some of that out what the faculty influences from the OER itself would you agree with that Regina yes I do and in fact with with our research the the faculty were teaching this course like the OER course didn't change anything so they certainly the student learning outcome is the same they there was no really sign of the course now that the course is using an OER again really that is hard to isolate you know whether the improvement or the decrease you know was due to the OER or with with the with the faculty and the best way that we can isolate that was to eliminate that so that's why we did the one-on-one correspondence you know only faculty teaching prior to OER and OER our track right all righty thank you for that there's some other comments going on in the chat window I'm gonna just very briefly switch here for a moment before we come up on the hour whoops sorry excuse me for that I did not mean to do that I wanted to let those of you out there in our audience know about open ed week which is coming up the first week of March and this is a great opportunity if you haven't participated in the past it's the global celebration of open education worldwide about that impact that open education can have on teaching and learning and all of you are invited to participate you can submit materials webinars etc to the online schedule at the open education week org site there's also promotional materials if you want to do local events you can download posters to create you know event announcements happening right on your own campus so great event hope you'll participate in that we always have some special events that week for CCCO we are and we also do a reflection on that and share some of the great things you did you did afterwards and let's see just wanted to say our webinars are going into hiatus until February but stay in the loop if you're not on our email list go ahead and get yourself added there under on our website at ccc oer org under get involved community email love to hear from you happy holidays to everyone and we're going to go back to Q&A for our two amazing presenters once again big thanks to David Rose from American University and Regina Gong from Lansing Community College all right did anyone who wants to grab the microphone is welcome to do that or Regina or David if you had any closing remarks we're just hitting the hour but I think we have time for one or two comments if you have anything to say if you are interested to to read about like different types of research the open net group website useful for that especially if you are trying to sell OER to your faculty because sometimes cost doesn't just cut it for them you know they want to know whether we are are effective in terms of what it brings to students so that might be a good way for you to prove that we are indeed you know can help students and are an effective way for them to essentially learn so yeah maybe oh sorry Regina um yeah I just agree with everything Regina said the open-edged group has been super helpful to me when highly recommend them for just your own data findings or if you're considering doing the fellowship too but I mean I'm just want to say thanks for Regina for inviting me here thanks for CCC OER and Una and Liz for hosting this and I'm happy to stick around if anyone has any questions all right thank you both again for sharing all that wonder those wonderful findings we put the the website for open-ed group there we also love the open-ed group research and the folks there and we link to many of their research papers from our website as well so thanks everyone and we look forward to talking with you in the new year if not before have a great afternoon


And U.S. President Joe Biden today escalated his rhetorical attacks on the Republican Party and rebuked former President Donald Trump's enduring grip over the GOP. What happens if you have a state changed the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can't be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit under the way the decision is written? What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this megacrow is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history and recent American history. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, during a visit to the Polish capital, Warsaw, says there should be an investigation into Russia's conduct in the war in Ukraine, as she condemns what she says, where atrocities of unimaginable proportions Russia caused its actions in Ukraine, a special military operation to disarm its neighbor and remove leaders it casts as dangerous. Poland's President Andres Duda had said Russian bombardments of hospitals and housing estates and the resulting loss of civilian lives was barbaric and resembled genocide. What we've concluded is that there is enough connection, enough of a link between the Putin regime and the individuals. And we should all be watching and I have no question the eyes of the world are on this war and what Russia has done in terms of this aggression and these atrocities of no doubt. We have been witnessing for weeks and certainly just in the last 24 hours atrocities of unimaginable proportion. A maternity hospital, a children's hospital, where we have witnessed pregnant women who were there for care for one reason being taken out because they required care because of an act of violence, unprovoked, unjustified. So you get notified about fresh news updates.


I think it's important to note at the outset that the threat of chemical terrorism remains as real and as relevant today as it has ever been. We continue to see adversaries around the globe seeking out, acquiring and using in attacks a wide variety of chemicals to include explosives precursor chemicals. We continue to see adversaries targeting chemical facilities around the globe. I think the threat is made even more concerning by the continuing influx of fighters returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria by the proliferation of information about the development of chemical devices online, the inspiration worldwide of bad actors who may be seeking to use chemicals maliciously. So I think more important now than it has ever been that we come together as a truly unified chemical security community to share information, best practices, and lessons we've all learned to combat this chemical terrorism threat. So I think this global congress on chemical security and emerging threats is a really important step to ensure that we are able to effectively share information across our community, a community that as you note includes a wide variety of disciplines from law enforcement to regulators to military to chemical weapons, non-proliferation experts to the chemical chemical industry folks who are on the front lines of securing chemical supply chains and chemical facilities. So I think to the extent that we can bring together a true global community of actual expert chemical security practitioners we will be we will be making some very very important strides to ensuring the continuing sharing of of information across across our community information that will be critical to enabling us to sort of stay ahead of the ever ever evolving threat curve. I think it's important now more than ever to form a global chemical security community because the threat is evolving at a rate of speed the likes of which we have not seen in the in the past. We have technology coming into play. We have evolving threat vectors such as unmanned aircraft systems, drones. We have concerns about the attacks on cyber systems at chemical facilities so an area of concern we have strived to address in the United States through among other things our chemical facility anti-terrorism standards program and as mentioned previously you know the proliferation of information about about attack tactics techniques and procedures that is available so widely through through technology via the the internet and and otherwise. I think the next step for for building our community and the next step for this global congress is to make it make our network make our community bigger and and better and to ensure that we are reaching across all relevant aspects of that of that community and it is a diverse community. It's for that reason that in my role as a co-chair of the global partnerships of the G7 Global Partnerships Chemical Security Working Group we have strived to identify initiatives to bring the community together to to bring together actual expert practitioners in the chemical security arena to identify opportunities to to convene these experts to to share in to enable them to share information across the the community and I think the global congress as I said in my remarks this morning really hits the mark on all of those fronts so while it's important that we have diplomats and policymakers at the table important in terms of building political support for chemical terrorism anti-terrorism activities it is very important as well that expert practitioners in chemical security are talking directly to one another sharing your information directly with one another and that's exactly what this global congress does so more better bigger in the future.


Well, once again this morning we're helping you find your perfect neighborhood with an abundance of restaurants shopping malls office parks Hotels and private schools four ways is an exclusive neighborhood with a high demand when it comes to property But is this the neighborhood for you private property launch their campaign in neighborhoods Which gives you a glimpse into our South African neighborhoods and Simon Bray CEO of private property is here to tell us a bit more about the four ways Area Simon nice to have you back with us brother. Good to be here. Yeah four ways I've always liked four ways man, you know, it takes me back into my my history my school days ran both four ways Oh, yes. Yeah, love it. Love it had a nice draw them four ways But we're talking about it as a as a neighborhood potentially for living there What makes this area so, you know, so high in demand for property owners? Well, I mean one of the things you touched on actually was just the fun and the entertainment value that four ways offers And I mean you got a lot of brilliant Attractions in the area. You've got Montecasino You've got four ways mall broad acres Cedar Lakes So there's an abundance of activities for you and your family to enjoy on a weekend So I think that's one of the draw cards around four ways area The other is just that it's a it's certainly a growth node in Johannesburg You know Johannesburg is is booming as an economy and and is in property market And you're seeing a lot of growth and most of it is happening in that northern hub between Johannesburg traditional CBD and Pretoria and four ways sit slap bang in the middle there and it's one of the fastest growing areas It's certainly one of the areas that we watching very closely from a property point of view And you can see why you know a lot of people moving into the area when they want to purchase their first home It's a great investment opportunity as well Yeah And I think it's also nice that they that you've got the airport closed by Lansiri airport just down the road That's true. You actually got two options, you know, you can either fly out of Tumbo or Lansiri So so looking at the property market, what type of property would the four ways area include? Well, I think this is one of the most interesting things about the area and how it's developing You know the traditional mine sets of South Africans has been give me this big Four five bedroom home. Give me a big piece of land and that's how I want to live But what we're seeing in four ways is a trend towards more modern living living that we might see in some first world Nations in Europe or the States you're seeing Smaller homes energy efficient homes easier to maintain Certainly a trend towards sectional title and community living for the safety and security options that that offers So four ways is interesting in that respect. We definitely seeing all the new growth in sectional title and smaller More modern living and I think another thing that makes this such an attractive area The fact that it's one of the fastest growing business and also residential areas in South Africa. Absolutely I mean the growth. There's been phenomenal. I think we've been talking a little bit about it already, but there's definitely no end in sight The it really does continue to grow and boom and that's driving one area of the market. Which is very interesting Corporate rentals. So four ways is becoming very sought after for corporates to place their Their employees or their contract workers in so you'll find the options to invest in property Particularly those sectional title lock up and go type properties and then place a corporate rental are very high And that's obviously if you're a private investor That's a great thing to know that the rentals back not only by a private individual but by ultimately a big business a big corporate So that's it's a good investment opportunity as well. Absolutely. Well, it's definitely got the makeup of the perfect neighborhood But in terms of the type of person the demographic, you know, what would this area suit most, you know Typically this is a first-time buyers market or or certainly young families market They're looking for the safety and security. They're looking for the access to to the corporate environments close by And so you're seeing a lot of people Between 30 and 40 buying into the neighborhood. In fact, when we profiled four ways we we chose South African motocross champion Brian Kappa and his family and he's just moved into the area And one of the things he particularly likes is you mentioned the Nanseria just outside but that whole area up to the cradle of humankind is a great cycling opportunity and Cycling is the fastest-growing sport in South Africa So you're seeing a lot of guys living in the four ways area so that they can cycle every morning It's perfect. I love the four ways area man So lastly just your your tip of the day when it comes to four ways Well, I mean any neighborhood is important to check out what the key elements of that neighborhood are before you Move in when you're talking four ways a great opportunity that I think people are missing is this corporate rental opportunity So our tip of the day would certainly be look for a great investment opportunity and place a corporate tenant Simon thank you so much for joining us man. Really appreciate it Well, if you ever considered living in four ways now you have enough information to make that decision But deciding on the neighborhood you want to stay in is really now easy as one two three All you need to do is log on to www.privateproperty.co.za and let them guide you through the right neighborhood perfect for you


Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson says he's retiring from politics after losing his bid for Minnesota's governor a second time. The 51-year-old Johnson said Monday he's retiring from the Hennepin County Board at the end of his term in 2020. He tells the Star Tribune he thinks it's time to give someone else an opportunity to change things. Johnson was a Republican endorsed candidate for governor in 2014 and 2018. He lost to Democrat Tim Walls last week in a Democrat Mark Dayton four years ago. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.