We're back with Justin Borgman of Starburst and Richard Jarvis of EMIS Health. Okay, we're going to get it to lie number two and that is this, an open source based platform cannot give you the performance and control that you can get with a proprietary system. Is that a lie? Justin, the enterprise data warehouse has been pretty dominant and has evolved and matured. It's stack is mature over the years. Why is it not the default platform for data? Yeah, well, I think that's become a lie over time. So I think, you know, if we go back 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the first data lake really around Hadoop, that probably was true, that you couldn't get the performance that you needed to run fast interactive SQL queries in a data lake. Now, a lot's changed in 10 or 12 years. I remember in the very early days, people would say you'll never get performance because you need to be columnar. You need to store data in a columnar format. And then, you know, columnar formats were introduced to data lakes. You have Parquet, ORC file and Abro that were created to ultimately deliver performance out of that. So, okay, we got largely over the performance hurdle. You know, more recently people will say, well, you don't have the ability to do updates and deletes like a traditional data warehouse. And now we've got the creation of new data formats. Again, like iceberg and Delta and Hootie that do allow for updates and delete. So I think the data lake has continued to mature. And I remember a quote from Kurt Monash many years ago where he said, you know, it takes six or seven years to build a functional database. I think that's right. And now we've had you almost a decade go by. So, you know, these technologies have matured to really deliver very close to the same level of performance and functionality of cloud data warehouses. So I think the reality is that's become a lie. And now we have large, giant hyperscale internet companies that don't have the traditional data warehouse at all. They do all of their analytics in a data lake. So I think we've proven that it's very much possible today. Thank you for that. So Richard, talk about your perspective as a practitioner in terms of what open brings you versus, I mean, closed is open as a moving target. I remember UNIX used to be open systems. And so it's an evolving, you know, spectrum. But from your perspective, what does open give you that you can't get from a proprietary system or you're fearful of in a proprietary system? I suppose for me, open buys us the ability to be unsure about the future. Because one thing that's always true about technology is it evolves in a direction slightly different to what people expect. And what you don't want to end up is done is backed itself into a corner that then prevents it from innovating. So if you have chosen a technology and you've stored trillions of records in that technology and suddenly a new way of processing or machine learning comes out, you want to be able to take advantage and your competitive edge might depend upon it. And so I suppose for us, we acknowledge that we don't have perfect vision of what the future might be. And so by backing open storage technologies, we can apply a number of different technologies to the processing of that data. And that gives us the ability to remain relevant, innovate on our data storage. And we have bought our way out of the, any performance concerns, because we can use cloud scale infrastructure to scale up and scale down as we need. And so we don't have the concerns that we don't have enough hardware today to process what we want to do, want to achieve. We can just scale up when we need it and scale back down. So open source has really allowed us to maintain the being at the cutting edge. So just let me play devil's advocate here a little bit. I've talked to Jamak about this, and obviously her vision is there's an open source, that data mesh is open source, open source tooling, and it's not a proprietary, you're not going to buy a data mesh, you're going to build it with open source toolings and vendors like you are going to support it. But to come back to sort of today, you can get to market with a proprietary solution faster, I'm going to make that statement. You tell me if it's a lie. And then you can say, okay, we support Apache Iceberg. We're going to support open source tooling. Take a company like VMware, not really in the data business, but how the way they embraced Kubernetes and every new open source thing that comes along, they say, we do that too. Why can't proprietary systems do that and be as effective? Yeah, well, I think at least within the data landscape, saying that you can access open data formats like Iceberg or others is a bit disingenuous because really what you're selling to your customer is a certain degree of performance, a certain SLA. And those cloud data warehouses that can reach beyond their own proprietary storage, drop all the performance that they were able to provide. So it reminds me kind of of again, going back 10 or 12 years ago, when everybody had a connector to Hadoop and they thought that was the solution, right? But the reality was, a connector was not the same as running workloads in Hadoop back then. And I think similarly, being able to connect to an external table that lives in an open data format, you're not going to give it the performance that your customers are accustomed to. And at the end of the day, they're always going to be predisposed. They're always going to be incentivized to get that data ingested into the data warehouse because that's where they have control. And the bottom line is the database industry has really been built around vendor lock-in. I mean, from the start, how many people love Oracle today, but our customers nonetheless, I think lock-in is part of this industry. And I think that's really what we're trying to change with open data formats. Well, it's interesting, reminded of when I see the gas price, the teaser gas price, I drive up and then I say, okay, that's the cash price. Credit card, I'm going to pay 20 cents more. But okay. But so the argument then, so let me come back to you, Justin. So what's wrong with saying, hey, we support open data formats, but yeah, you're going to get better performance if you keep it into our closed system. Are you saying that long-term, that's going to come back and bite you because you're going to end up, you mentioned Oracle, you mentioned Teradata, by implication, you're saying that's where Snowflake customers are headed. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a movie that we've all seen before, at least those of us who've been in the industry long enough to see this movie play over a couple of times. So I do think that's the future. And I think, I loved what Richard said. I actually wrote it down because I thought it was an amazing quote. He said, it buys us the ability to be unsure of the future. That pretty much says it all. The future is unknowable and the reality is using open data formats, you remain interoperable with any technology you want to utilize. If you want to use Spark to train a machine learning model and you want to use Starburst to query it via SQL, that's totally cool. They can both work off of the same exact data sets. By contrast, if you're focused on a proprietary model, then you're kind of locked in again to that model. I think the same applies to data sharing, to data products, to a wide variety of aspects of the data landscape that a proprietary approach kind of closes you and it locks you in. So I would say this, Richard, I'd love to get your thoughts on it because I talked to a lot of Oracle customers, not as many Teradata customers, but a lot of Oracle customers and they'll admit, yeah, they're jamming at some price and the license costs are good, but we do get value out of it. And so my question to you, Richard, is do the, let's call it data warehouse systems or the proprietary systems, are they going to deliver a greater ROI sooner? And is that in a lore of that customers are attracted to? Or can open platforms deliver as fast an ROI? I think the answer to that is, it can depend a bit. It depends on your business's skill set. So we're lucky that we have a number of proprietary teams that work in databases that provide our operational data capability. And we have teams of analytics and big data experts who can work with open datasets and open data formats. And so for those different teams, they can get to an ROI more quickly with different technologies. For the business, though, we can't do better for our operational data stores than proprietary databases today. We can back off very tight SLAs to them. We can demonstrate reliability from millions of hours of those databases being run at enterprise scale. But for an analytics workload where increasing our business is growing in that direction, we can't do better than open data formats with cloud-based data mesh type technologies. And so it's not a simple answer that one will always be the right answer for our business. We definitely have times when proprietary databases provide a capability that we couldn't easily replicate with open technologies. Yeah, Richard, stay with you. You mentioned some things before that strike me. You know, the Databricks Snowflake thing is always a lot of fun for analysts like me. You've got Databricks coming at it. Richard, you mentioned you have a lot of Rockstar data engineers. Databricks coming at it from a data engineering heritage. You got Snowflake coming at it from an analytics heritage. Those two worlds are colliding people like Sanjeev Mohan has said, you know what, I think it's actually harder to play in the data engineering. So IE, it's easier for data engineering world to go into the analytics world versus the reverse. But thinking about up and coming engineers and developers preparing for this future of data engineering and data analytics, how should they be thinking about the future? What's your advice to those young people? So I think I'd probably fall back on general programming skillsets. So the advice that I saw years ago was if you have open source technologies, the pythons and javas on your CV, you command a 20% pay hike over people who can only do proprietary programming languages. And I think that's true of data technologies as well. And from a business point of view, that makes sense. I'd rather spend the money that I save on proprietary licenses on better engineers because they can provide more value to the business that can innovate us beyond our competitors. So I think my advice to people who are starting here or trying to build teams to capitalize on data assets is begin with open license-free capabilities because they're very cheap to experiment and they generate a lot of interest from people who want to join you as a business and you can make them very successful early doors with your analytics journey. And it's interesting, again, analysts like myself, we do a lot of TCO work and have over the last 20 plus years. And in the world of Oracle, normally it's the staff that's the biggest nut in total cost of ownership. Not in Oracle, it's the license cost is by far the biggest component in the blame pie. All right, Justin, help us close out this segment. We've been talking about this sort of data mesh, open, closed, snowflake, Databricks. Where does Starburst sort of as this engine for the data lake house, the data warehouse fit in this world? Yeah, so our view on how the future ultimately unfolds is we think that data lakes will be a natural center of gravity for a lot of the reasons that we described, open data formats, lowest total cost of ownership because you get to choose the cheapest storage available to you. Maybe that's S3 or Azure data lake storage or Google cloud storage, or maybe it's on-prem object storage that you bought at a really good price. So ultimately storing a lot of data in a data lake makes a lot of sense, but I think what makes our perspective unique is we still don't think you're going to get everything there either. We think that basically centralization of all your data assets is just an impossible endeavor. And so you want to be able to access data that lives outside of the lake as well. So we kind of think of the lake as maybe the biggest place by volume in terms of how much data you have, but to have comprehensive analytics and to truly understand your business and understand it holistically, you need to be able to go access other data sources as well. And so that's the role that we want to play is to be a single point of access for our customers, provide the right level of fine-grained access controls so that the right people have access to the right data and ultimately make it easy to discover and consume via the creation of data products as well. Great, okay, thanks guys. Right after this quick break, we're going to be back to debate whether the cloud data model that we see emerging and the so-called modern data stack is really modern or is it the same wine new bottle when it comes to data architectures? You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.


Hey guys, this is Matt back from free salon education comm. I'm here with another quick business tip for you And this is focused on your male clientele. Do you have a male clientele? Do you know the percentage of male male to female clients that you have? This is something in our salon. We're 51 percent male clientele So you've probably seen in a lot of our videos that we do a lot of men's cutting It's because we actually do a lot of men's cuts in the salon We've created an experience to try to draw more male clientele in our salon and why would we want to do that? Big question that I ask in any business program that I do.  Can you answer that question? Well, most of the time people answer it with they make more money off their women If you look at a woman's cut and if we just look at haircut alone Most women only visit the salon four times a year So if they're only visiting the salon four times a year and let's say you're a $40 haircut and you have a guy Who's a $20 haircut and he comes to the salon 12 to 24 times a year. You're making a potential $600 every year off of a guy and only $200 off of a female potentially so I think that's the big thing you need to look at where you trying to grow your salon and who is The the clientele that's going to be most dedicated to your salon and guys are very dedicated They buy a lot of product. They are very loyal to you once once a guy is comfortable with the hair salon He's going to stick with you So I want you to see take a look at our salon menu And I don't want to show you this whole thing Maybe we'll do another video on that if you would like but this is so you open it up and it's going to be very colorful It's got a lot of stuff going on a lot of female services and that's basically how our menus are all kind of drawn up But once you get through it Right here. We have a menu dedicated to guys so this is our menu and We have cuts clean ups neck shaves men's color and eyebrow details We have different services catered towards guys because if you have a guy in your salon every single week to two weeks He's going to take advantage full advantage of these services and the more you upgrade guys The more money you will make and the more dedicated they'll be to you because you're taking care of them So that's just something that I love to look up. I like checking it out It's another thing that you'll find in Millennium if you check it out there through the MA 200 report I think it does a breakdown of male and female guests and your percentage There's also a lot of other reports you can see on that But if you don't know what your percentage of male clientele is then how can you grow that? That type of clientele and what are you doing to market that? Because think about if you just had a guy come in for a $20 haircut and he's coming in 24 times a year and you upgrade him just 15 more dollars to just getting a gray blending or something like that That's a huge difference in your paycheck every week So whether you're a salon owner a salon manager or a stylist This is a big tip for you get dedicated to those guys They'll fill in the gaps where you're not busy and you'll be more successful in the salon So make sure if you don't have a menu for guys make a menu create an experience We do a hot towel for the guys on their faces We do two rinses for them so that they don't have hair all over them when they leave And we try to cater to them. We give them a beer if that's what they want So we try to do different things that create a Manlier environment within a hair salon to boost that male clientele So hope this tip helps you guys if you don't have a computer software check out Millennium because that'll help break down those Percentages and it'll really make your business boom and be more successful. So I hope this tip helped you We'll see you on the next video. Thanks guys


I think made Manoa so tough on you guys today. He was looking at his pitches. You tip your hat. We gave him a little pressure. Didn't come through, but he's got three pitches that he can locate, and he was locating them, and you tip your hat to him. He did a good game. You look back at that third inning. He does lose command a little bit there. Three walks, do you feel, as though you look back at that one and think that's a place where we could have really broken through?  You get momentum, but I think we did a good job of taking our walks and not really expanding too much on him. But I mean, he was locating his fastball, throwing his slider off of that, and this change up. So we're going to run into that, and we've just got to keep putting pressure. And I think we did once we got him out.  So just got to have a good advance. How good standing there was Tyome tonight, watching him for the first start this year? It was really good. Stuff looked, I mean, he wasn't getting a lot of, you know, it was a couple, I think, his hits were two strikes, except maybe the homer, the spring homer, but he looked like all of his pitches had good action. Anthony, you saw the Blue Jays a lot in spring training. How much of a challenge are they going to be in this division this year? Yeah, I mean, they're a good team. They're a good team. They're this whole division, the Red Sox, the Blue Jays, the Reys, the Orioles aren't just going to bow down either. They're up and coming and have guys on the way. So I just think every game and every day is, you know, we lost it. That's it. And tomorrow we'll come back and do what we can do to win. And that's really all you can do.


Welcome everybody. It's so wonderful to see so many of you here in this final webinar that CCC OER is offering for spring 2023. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening depending on where you are in the world. Thank you so much for being here. Our webinar today is called the transformative power of OER ZTC pathways. My name is Shinta Hernandez and I am from Montgomery College and I'm on the Executive Council of CCC OER and as the Vice President of Professional Development and let's get started. So to give you an idea of what we will go over in this hour that we are here together, I'm going to give you a quick overview of CCC OER. And then we'll dive right into the presentations from two wonderful panelists that we have here for you. And then we will offer an opportunity for you to ask some questions to the panelists. And then in the end we've got some things that we want to wrap up with wrap up up, including becoming events and ways in which you can stay in the loop. And then we also have a survey that we would love for you to fill out at the end. So a little bit about CCC OER what is our mission. We certainly like to and want to expand awareness and increase access to high quality open educational resources OER's. We also have a plethora of professional development. And so we support faculty choice and development. We foster regional OER leadership, and we improve student equity and success by way of the things that we do through CCC OER. And to give you an idea of how vast our membership is across the country and across the North American region, we've got 103 members across 37 states. So it's really a lot and it's I'm certainly probably growing as we speak and we're going to talk more about membership opportunities in a second. But if you're interested in seeing who the current members are, take a look at that URL that is at the bottom of that link and so you can see which institutions are a part of the CCC OER membership. And speaking of membership CCC OER is always looking for new members on our committees. And so we've got four committees who do a wide range of things that really help to promote and advance our mission. And so we've got the professional development committee, the equity and diversity and inclusion committee membership committee and research and impact committee. And to find out more about what each of the committees will be doing, please again take a look at the URL that is at the bottom of your screen, and it is also going to be placed in the chat. Take a look and if you're interested, definitely reach out to us. Some exciting stuff happening this summer. We've got what we have is the EDI Summer Book Club, something that we've been doing the last couple of summers. And these are live meetings with asynchronous discussion groups that and this year our focus will be this book right here. So we are origin stories pathways to the open movement edited by Ursula Pike, who's a longtime friend of CCC OER. And this book club begins June 1, it ends August 10. We are in need of some facilitators so please if you are interested in helping us facilitate this book club discussion. Please reach out to us sign up at that URL link that is at the bottom. There is training for the facilitators on May 7. So, please read some more. Go into that link right there at the bottom to read more about it and please if you're interested, reach out we would love to have you facilitate our book club. Another exciting thing that is happening OE Global Open Education Global. This year, this fall, it is happening in Edmonton, Canada. So, please join us it's going to be the theme is building a sustainable world through open education, being hosted at Northwest College from October 16 through the 18 and call for proposals closes next Monday so we don't we only have a few days left. So if you have an idea and you want to put it out there, please go ahead and submit the URL for the conference is down below on the part left. Take a look at it read more about it and submit your proposals and come join us in Edmonton in October this year. As many of us know and hire at this is the season of awards, right many of us at our own institutions are handing out awards to deserve students and faculty and staff and so we do something very similar we've got open education awards for 2023 opening up next Monday. Take a look. It's a wide range of different types of awards that will be given. Take a look at our URL link to look at the different categories and to see the past winners and the kinds of things that have been awarded. So, take a look we're really excited about this year's process again. All right, now, down to the real treat here, which is the actual presentations and our wonderful panelists. I have had the pleasure of introducing to you to people who are have a lot of experience in DTC and we are pathways. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce and say a little bit about themselves, and then we will get right into the presentations. So first we have here Regina Blassburg Regina has been a full time faculty at the College of the canyons since fall of 2006. In addition to being chair of both the engineering technologies department and the construction management and construction technology department. She is a senator on the academic Senate and serve for five years as the first CTE liaison, where she established and co chair the career education committee. Regina implemented high flex instruction at College of the canyons in 2011, and was able to transition the water program to a ZTC AS degree program over the next several years through the development of OER texts for each course in the program. Regina earned her BS in civil engineering from Loyola Marymount University and her MS in civil engineering from UCLA. I also want to introduce Nathan Smith. Nathan is the interim chair of philosophy humanities and library sciences at Houston Community College. He has a PhD in philosophy from Boston College and the University of Paris Sorbonne. His dissertation was on Renee Descartes early scientific and mathematical work. He has been a full time instructor philosophy at Houston Community College since 2008. Introduction to philosophy, ethics, logic, classical philosophy, early modern philosophy, contemporary philosophy and social and political philosophy. He has published on Descartes, phenomenology and topics and open educational resources, including chapter contributions to introduction to philosophy logic, and he is a senior contributing author for introduction to philosophy by open stacks. In 2017, Nathan led a grant funded initiative, developing a C degree pathway at all major campuses in the Houston Community College system. So without further ado, let me hand this zoom over to Regina Blasberg. Hey everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for having me it's really a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the invite. So I'm going to start out by telling you a little bit about the water systems technology program at College of the canyons it is a career education program. We offer both an associate of science degree and a certificate. And the goal of the program is to prepare our students for careers as a water treatment water distribution or wastewater operator. And in the state of California, as in most states, there is a board that requires, or that offers certification exams and those exams are required for employment. So we help prepare students for those exams. What you're looking at on the slide are the courses that we have within our program. The program is designed with five core courses. So they have to water math classes, a water supply a water quality and then a general introduction to water course. And then the students can choose whether they wish to sort of specialize in distribution treatment or wastewater. So many of our students, especially if they're pursuing the degree will take all of those courses as they can have certifications in more than one area and be more marketable in the employment arena. Oh, shouldn't you want to move that on there. There we go. It's really an idea where a relatively small program compared to some other more mainstream programs at the colleges, our median class size is 20 we offer 23 sections per year, and we do okay in terms of our AS degrees awarded and certificates awarded these are from the last couple years of data, and our annual student head count within the program is around last year it was 161 but it's in that 150 to 170 bracket most years. So not a gigantic program. So how did we go about developing our we are or ZTC like where did it come from water programs in the state of California, there are not many, even though we have, I don't know, 115 community colleges now 116 community colleges now, but out of all of those there was maybe a handful, 810 colleges that offered water courses. So there was just sort of a general lack of available resources. The Waterworks Association did provide some textbooks that we could use, but at that time, they were very informational and not instructional in the way that they were designed, and they were expensive. To develop our materials, we started looking at our full time in our part time faculty and tried to get some combination to work on the we are materials. Initially, in our one water math class, a gentleman who had been part of the program before me had developed a book and was allowing us to continue to use it until he wasn't. And of course that happens last minute. So our first book was our water 130 introductory mathematics Waterworks mathematics textbook, and that was developed by one of our part time faculty in conjunction with myself. So we have tremendous support from our online education office and staff James is here on the call and heads that up and he's tremendous in getting us both financial support and other resources to get things developed. The big push came from a grant out that James was able to assist us with, and that allowed us to start moving beyond the one textbook to other textbooks as well, which then required bringing in other industry experts and industry partners to help us write the content. I at the time was the only full time faculty member and I am split across multiple disciplines. So it really wasn't feasible for me to be able to write all of these textbooks on my own. So I had to rely on our industry experts and our partners and of course, on additional grant funding to ensure that all of that was able to be developed in a timely manner. So our successes as Shinta mentioned in the introduction. I brought high flex instruction to our college in 2011 high flex allowed our students to join our classes remotely via zoom. And so we were able to get water students from a greater range of areas and students were able to take more classes in a semester, because they didn't have to drive to campus three or four nights a week. But not having easy access to a textbook was problematic so the OER movement within the department really helped support our high flex and it really helped support access for our students. So that has been incredibly successful for us. It certainly did a lot for inclusivity and DEIA as because we developed the books were able to really write them in such a way and try to include graphics and things in such a way that it is more inclusive. We also found that our books are highly, highly accessible. And that's again thanks very much to James office and his staff they do a tremendous job of editing our materials and making sure that they are fully accessible. Going into this OER realm then also allowed students to access their materials materials digitally or printed they could print them at home, they could print them for free through our ASG student office, and then our bookstore also offers a low cost option for providing a printed copy. And of course it's been super successful in the program as the material is very customized to our curriculum, and what we are trying to do, whereas prior the only other option we had where the A, W, W, A textbooks, and we then kind of had to make those work for our content. So, in doing all of these things and bringing OER in Shinta you want to pop it to the next slide please thank you. We saw that our success and retention rates slowly began to rise. And that to me was a huge benefit and improvement for our program overall. You can see back from 2014 15. I mentioned we kind of started these efforts in 2011, but it was a very slow build and then James was able to get us a grant in that I think 2016 17 or 1718 year. And you can see as we started implementing after that that's when we ended up with an entire pathway with OER, then our numbers absolutely began to to increase and we've been able to pretty well maintain that now for a number of years. And I really believe strongly that the high flex paired with our OER has been really the primary reason we're seeing these improvements. Challenges. This is the cover by the way of our Waterworks Mathematics book currently. The biggest challenge has just been ongoing funding as a department chair and the only full time faculty. I didn't really understand and jumping into this, what it was going to mean to be a book publisher, which is what my department has become. It has been very challenging to continually update textbooks and to have the funding and the knowledge base to keep everything as updated as it needs to be to align with what's happening in industry and the changes that are, you know, happening within the water world. A peer review has been a problem. We, for example, we're doing CID common course numbering within the state of California, and there's so few programs in the state that it was really hard to find individuals who would be willing and able on the academic side to do a peer review of the material. Faculty workload is an issue. You know, it's not something that most of our faculty can just sort of absorb into their day to day workload of updating materials and keeping things fully current. That ties into that content expertise. If you're a treatment person, then you wouldn't necessarily be comfortable updating the wastewater content. You just have to be hunting out that individual expertise. Academic freedom is also a concern and something we're looking at. Every faculty member is entitled to select their teaching materials. So although we have chosen this as an OER pathway for our department, we constantly have to have that discussion within the department that this is the challenge that we wish to proceed and the materials that we wish to use to benefit students. So, and then lastly, one of the challenges was distribution. How do I, at the department level, get it out to other colleges and to other water programs that these materials are available for their use so that all of the effort and money and expense we've put into developing OER for not only our students but for the industry actually gets used. And that will benefit beyond the borders of our institution. Thank you so much Regina for sharing your, your work with us. And at this point we'll hand this over to Nathan Smith to talk about what's been happening at Houston Community College. So hopefully you can see my screen alright. So, I'm the interim chair of philosophy at the humanities and library sciences at Houston Community College. One of the cool things is that actually we are now are going to be a philosophy department in the fall so I will be the incoming chair of that department. We, but I'm going to talk about my experiences with the Z degree program which we launched in fall of 2017. And we've, we started out that this was a grant funded act opportunity to develop a Z zero cost textbook pathway in in business associate of science and business administrative in business. And we. That was the initial plan we rolled out courses starting in fall 17 by the spring semester of 2019 so to four semesters after launching, we actually had the entire pathway built. So we had trained instructors in the relevant courses and had either found materials or adapted materials or implemented those materials. At that stage we had done very little serve, we are creation, but we. So we ran with business and at the same time we were building an associate of arts and multidisciplinary studies which is our basically our Jen, Jen at our general, our general studies, sort of associates in arts. So that we were building that alongside the business pathway. And, and what that has allowed us to do is basically generate a zero cost core curriculum. So in Texas we have a 42 credit, or that's actually completely transferable from to Texas State institutions and we can, we have those core classes basically offered at most of the major campuses in an online. And because we have that core, we can then add courses in degree plans that include the core to build out there's those degrees that works really well in the liberal arts. So we've had success with interdisciplinary studies and English and adding them and we're in the process of getting at anthropology close to a complete associates degree. So the challenge has been more in the STEM areas where we've had less sort of uptake on these in these in that in the OER courses. So, let's see go on here. So when we talk about OER at HCC we have, I mean sometimes this is a little confusing to folks. So we have, we talk about OER internally, we train faculty on, you know, open educational practices, as well as sort of licensing and all that sort of thing. But when we talk to students and when we present the programs to students, we focus on the cost. So we have a course tags for zero cost books, low and low cost books. We also are integrated with the textbook saving a larger textbook savings initiative, which includes inclusive access so we also have an inclusive access tag. So some of our low cost books classes are either OER using some paid for courseware, or they are OER plus like certain some additional texts like monographs and so forth. So when we track our data, typically we focus on the zero cost books or the zero cost books or at least what we take to comprise our Z degree pathways. And these are current numbers where, and you can see we have pretty large reach, you know, about 60 unique courses, 260 instructors, over 25,000 student enrollments that's duplicated that's not individual students in the classes. And we're probably over $7 million saved since 2017. And this is actually calculated based on the real cost of the textbook so we're not just inserting sort of like $100 sort of average fee. We're trying to actually take the cost of the textbooks and put them in there. To support our instructors and help them kind of get transition to OER. We offer an online OER certification course. That's a, it's a four week course about 15 hours, and take some through some basics of, you know, the licensing. We do some course redesign stuff. We also talk about open pedagogy. We also talk about creation and sharing and sort of platforms for that. We also have adaptation and we have internal grants for adaptation development and certified courses. So we have a grant program set up internally that follows our faculty handbook guidelines for for grants and someone asked a question about how, how much money the stipends are. In our case, we, we are, we're constrained by paying our full time faculty at our adjunct rate. That's kind of the way that we calculate work that is beyond your regular assignment. We have, we calculate, we have a, like, sort of the, we have 15 hours for the certification. The certified course process is about a, is a, I think it's a 30 hour process. And then adaption and development grabs grants can be, can range from 30 hours to 90 hours, which would be the equivalent of a course. And all of that. We've also developed some, some repositories for faculty are our librarians have done an amazing job developing lib guides for various programs to help faculty find. We are, and we've also built a hub and just published a hub in the Texas repository, which sure curates materials and offers problem. Resources for faculty. So we have those ways of supporting our faculty to get them engaged in the program. And then one thing the coordinator does is try to work with the chairs to ensure that we are staffing and scheduling courses and a structured schedule so that students could actually complete a Z degree. Now, we don't have the great fortune that Regina does where they have a program where they can actually follow students through and they're getting students to graduate and they can say these students graduated without paying for their books. Unfortunately, we just we offer the courses we can't do any we don't have a ton of advising and contact with students in terms of their enrollment. What we see is that very few students take five, five zero cost courses in the course of graduating for their degree. Most students dip in and out they take like two or three courses in the in the process of getting to their degree. So we don't have a lot of students who are completing an entire Z degree pathway. I think we had like one or two who got, you know, maybe halfway there like 10 to 15 courses, but, but we don't have that sort of that sort of level of the advising and the high touch that that requires to get students through. I mentioned funding and we have been grant funded since 2017. We've also been internally funded one of the really good things that are a private grant fund or the kinder foundation provided for us was when we submitted the grant they said we want to one to one institutional match on this funding. So we developed internal budget lines to support the program. So that means we have a release time or alternative assignment for a faculty member to serve as the OER coordinator. We have some travel funds, which we used to use back before COVID, and I hope, and hopefully they will stay there in some form of fashion as we get back into the post COVID world of actually going to conferences. We used to send adjunct faculty. We'd send three or four of them to open ed every year that was kind of the way we use those funds. We have stipend funds and some funds, some small funds for marketing supplies. This has actually been pretty good big because we put a promotional materials in the enrollment offices at all the campuses and give flyers to advisors with the idea that they can tell students how to find our courses. So it's not just the kinder foundation grant that we've we've had success. We have a great, a wonderful state grant system through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and we've been very successful in getting grants for that. Those are grants that go to individual faculty or groups of faculty who are developing resources or implementing them. We had a great success. All of our chemistry classes now, basically their lab manuals are all OER. They've developed entirely OER lab manuals. We have several in biology. They're doing the same thing. And then we've had success partnering with other institutions on the Department of Education. We've had open textbook pilot grants. And so there was this was one in 2020 with open stacks for computer science. And then we got, we've just been awarded one working with the University of Houston downtown to develop chemistry, online chemistry labs. So as we look at sort of success measures, I don't have as nice a slide as Regina did to show the nice upward progress of her program. But what I can say is that we did have done a couple of like pretty careful quantitative studies of the impacts of our program. One of them was a study that I was a principal author on. It was a zero cost books study published through frontiers in education. And it looked at sort of the early years of implementing our program. And we isolated instructors who taught with a traditional textbook and then flipped to an OER. And we looked at the impact of the OER versus this traditional textbook. So we could isolate instructor effects. We did a number of statistical, different statistical modeling that allowed us to sort of look at effects of students. And what we found was that on average, zero cost books students were more likely to pass than those students who are enrolled in traditional textbook classes. It wasn't a huge effect, but it was something that was that we can measure. We also saw that black students and Asian students both showed additional increases. So the interaction effect of a ZCB course plus those ethnic profiles seem to increase. So why is that the case, not sure, but it is interesting for you those of those institutions that are there that are like like ours that are definitely focused on closing achievement gaps for underrepresented minorities. We did an internal study where we examined the effectiveness of the zero cost books program, the low cost books program and the inclusive access. And I think the person in our institutional research who's been looking at that is actually looking to publish something on this so that will be really helpful. It will be one of the first of its kind to sort of examine to compare OER to the new, the publisher model inclusive access. And what we found was that at HCC at least zero cost books courses tend to have slightly higher success rates so it confirmed what we saw in the previous study. There are some exceptions. It depends on what course. But for most courses, we saw some improvement. We saw a couple of courses where it was a slight decrease and lots of them stayed the same. The reverse was true for inclusive access that is to say we saw a slight decrease in several course areas so that that's definitely something that that deserves further attention, and I thought was a really interesting. We had some qualitative assessments. I did some interviews early on with students. Their feedback is really helpful and I've really enjoyed getting that. I didn't have anything for you here, but we have, but I did talk to some students. They're big, their big thing was basically just it just seemed to relieve them of the burden of like carrying around textbooks and, and also paying things and freed up money they were all very appreciative that's kind of the, the sense we get from students they don't know they don't understand anything about the license type. I just know it's free. So I think we made the right choice in marketing as a zero cost books. We talked about challenges. I'll try to wrap up quickly here I know, maybe talk more about this in the Q&A. But I think, you know, we, this is we have implemented a very large scale zero cost books. OER program at a very large urban community college. We have something like 24 campus locations. So, and, and we service like 60,000 students a semester so that we can have a big impact. The problem is maintaining consistency and drive across the entire institution. The thing that we have have had an issue with is early on in our grant, we, I was persuaded by the idea that we, we could provide subsidies to our students to get access to OER courseware. And that the OER courseware would provide a kind of textbook substitute that looked like what the publishers were offering. And that that was the most effective way to get people into the program. That was a mistake. Because what has happened is that once the grant money was used up for that purpose. First of all, our funders weren't super excited about that. They didn't, they didn't think it was great to be spending grant money to pay for access to a courseware platform. And those faculty that I got that were the adopters under that system. Once the money dried up, they were gone. They weren't really committed to OER. And so I think we're, we've sort of had to reconstitute some of that stuff, some of that work. And I kind of, I wonder if we could have been more effective at the beginning. I think there's an issue around sort of clarity of purpose. What are we trying to do with this program. Now that I've stepped away, we're trying to get, have a succession plan with another leaders, and I think we're having a little challenge sort of focusing. We have a major competitor with inclusive access. This is a program that's been pushed by our administration and is being adopted widely at HCC, and it's directly at odds with I think what the OER program is doing. And so we continue to see sort of challenges where without, you know, wondering whether we have the sort of the support and confidence of our top level administrators. If you're, as you're developing, these are the kinds of things that, that really you need to think about. And the final thing, of course, is, is I think for everyone at HCC, we've been especially hard hit by COVID. Our enrollment numbers have not, not returned to pre COVID levels, and particularly on campus or on campus enrollment is just a shadow of for our former enrollment numbers. Since part of our Z degree pathways, the idea was to have a structured schedule on a specific campus where students could complete their pathways. We don't have enough courses right now to make that happen. And so, so we're really that I think is a big challenge as we move forward. I think that's all for me. So I'll go ahead and turn the calm back to back to Shinta. Thanks. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us. Thanks to both of you for providing us really all the successes and challenges and the data to show us what has worked and what hasn't worked. So I want to open this up now to a question and answer session. But there's some activity going on in chat that are at the time that we've been together and I see that there was a question earlier about compensation. James, thank you so much for addressing that in the chat. There is a question later on it could be for both of you. Kimberly Carter asks, I would be very interested in any published studies on student success. Do you have links to studies like that, or do you have any idea where you could direct Kimberly to to studies like that. I threw my study in the chat there and should definitely check the bibliography I'm going to go find there was a really good meta analysis done by Virginia Clinton recently and so I'll find that and throw it in the chat too. Thank you, Nathan. I don't have any separate studies, all of our data is pulled by our institutional research office that tracks all of our courses internally and provides us like the success and retention data. They did do a study early on of whether or not students were happy with the transition, but there's no otherwise outwardly published studies it's all internal data for us. Nina, and speaking of students in the chat Liz put that in 2018 CCC OER interview to student in College of the Canyons water systems technology CTC pathway to see what impact that pathway had on her educational journey and I just read it it's quite inspiring. I'm going to put it down here again. Take a look when you can it's always wonderful to hear student voices when we can or to hear about the students because at the end of every each and every day in our lives in our journeys. We do this for the students so I appreciate that Liz shared that story with us. I do have a question. Although there's another question that just came into chat so I'll ask this question and I'll save my questions for the very end. So Kate Kaufman is asking for saying we're also being challenged to consider I a versus OER as part of our student affordability model. Speaking of tracking points you found especially useful when speaking with administration about I a I find myself losing them when I try when I try to educate them about I a and need to make the case in a more succinct way. Nathan or again if you want to. I mean, I'm just going to share and response to Kate I shared a link to inclusive access.org which is a site that was kind of put together with the through the spark network which is an ad online, an open education advocacy organization. But the site itself I think is fairly balanced. There's questions raised that might be useful. There's, I will, there's a study actually you can find it on inclusive access.org by Elizabeth Elizabeth Spica from Tennessee, where she looked at the effectiveness of a statewide boost of access program. She found similar to our results that that they just don't see the impact the improvement in student success. When you when you go to that so it's I know it's hard to understand and I don't know that we fully understand why, but you know when your goal is cost savings. It looks like some cost savings are good, maybe zero cost savings would be better, but it's not clear why zero is qualitatively different than a lot. So from an administrative standpoint you can understand why I'm sure it was a well look faculty get to keep the same materials and they get cheaper. However, it seems that what we're finding is that zero actually matters. We have we found that at HCC and we see that in other other studies that actually eliminating the cost barrier is what you need to do, not just reduce the cost barrier. So I don't know if that helps. That's great. Thank you, Nathan. And just a couple of things and I'm reiterating what is in the chat just in case some of you might not be able to read everything that is in the chat. I would ask having an OER online certification program can be very helpful is that openly licensed. Nathan says yes it is available in Canvas Commons. So that is really good to good to know thank you for sharing that Nathan. And then another question from Elaine are books available for review on wastewater and Regina shared something in the chat so make sure you take a look at that. And if you're interested and definitely share it with your colleagues as well. I have a question for and it could be for either of you, Nathan you would, you would talked about this in your, in your presentation and I think Regina you may have alluded to it to leadership support right is a challenge especially when there is changes or gaps in leadership or alignments not the same across leadership levels. The OER efforts are it are the OER efforts in your institution strategic plan, or is it written anywhere that can serve as a guiding document for the work. So, I am actually going to throw that over to James, because he really heads up the OER work at our campus. It again it's integral to my department, we have determined internally to the department that this is for us, and that it's of great benefit to our students. The students in our program are part time adult learners, you know they're older than the quote traditional student. And so this has just been a tremendous impact and help for them. They're more of a that non traditional student. But yes institutionally up James thank you for popping in. Real quick. Thanks. We're going to begin it. It's kind of interesting in college the canyons. We had strong support from our executive leadership and strong faculty participation and interest in driving OER forward, long before sort of the institutional process is caught up and we now reference OER and ZPC degrees in our guided pathways plan in our student equity plan, and in our strategic plan. But yeah, the work came about because really innovative faculty like Regina wanted to do the work, not because, you know, an administrator like me wrote some words in a plan that nobody reads right. It's the faculty like Regina who are doing the real work. And thank you for sharing that James you're absolutely right the beauty comes when it's organically driven right when it is because people. Faculty such as Regina, who understand the students because they have those day to day interactions with students and understand the complexities of their lives are really the ones who are the driving force behind the work. Thank you and Nathan what about at Houston Community College is it written in the strategic plan or any kind of document. You know, we had a strategic planning process when I was OER coordinator and I tried, I proposed this. And the feedback that I got was that they didn't want to put any specific initiatives in the strategic plan. They wanted the strategic band to be very to be to represent general principles. So we were not able to get something specific to OER in the plan. As I said, we're working through right now, a strategic planning document for the OER program, where we're aligning it with the strategic plan for the institution and the alignments very clear. I mean, in terms of like a student success, increased access. And we have a personalized learning sort of component to our strategic plan. So there's, there's a lot of things that are really, that are really aligned there. So also I see the chatter in the chat about the my the training course and I am having trouble finding it in Canvas comments so I'm going to work on that and see if I can share it with you all. If not, I'll share a resource that's definitely public and free and that's close to what we used. We appreciate that, Nathan. Let me ask in the next couple of minutes if are there other questions and if you feel free to feel free to raise your virtual hand. If you'd like to ask it that way instead of on the chat. Luna is asking did either of you work with student student services. Thanks. Yes, we neglected to mention we, when we launched our Z degree we definitely had, we had an advice advising and enrollment student services Dean and financial aid in the in the room with us while we're trying to plan that. I think it's been harder to maintain contact with them. Most of the, we have an OER steering committee, but most of the conversations in those committees tend to be pretty nuts and bolts about sort of creation of content finding content what's suitable for what programs and, and it's a very academic or instruction sort of focus conversation that I think the student services are little disengaged from. So we have to figure out how to like engage them on the right level, but that's definitely we need them to partner for sure. We did something where we added OER course searching into the student orientation they do an online or an orientation when they enter. And so we have a slide in that orientation that tells them about how to find, find courses in the course catalog. Thank you Nathan and what about you Regina did you work with student services in your efforts. I didn't specifically out of the department level, but our college does have enlisting our course catalog, you know we do look at it does identify low cost courses ZTC courses. OER courses right we do have information for students through that process but I will say that we talked quite a bit about it at our academic senate meetings and it's still we still need better transparency to students when they register in terms of but there's limitations within our systems for how to put that information out. So we're still struggling with that a little bit. But yes, the information is available if students know how to sort and look for it in their registered registration materials. And Regina which system are you on. Christie is asking. James were on data tell. Right. Is that what we're still using internally. Yes, James. Oh banner. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, and, and really, to that point, when we approach a lot of our work, much of our work, including this OER work, coming from or using a holistic model that is really truly comprehensive and authentically partner with all the different entities within our community that is often the most effective way to achieve our shared goals and then when you have teams that are cross functional. Once again that really helps to allow different components of the institution to have ownership of the work so that they can see themselves in the importance of this work. So thank you to both of you let me just make sure that on chat. There's anything else. Any other questions that are being asked here. Any other questions that you all might have in the minute that we have left before I wrap up the webinar. I found the course link so I put it in there, and I also want to just highlight Judith Sabesta's comment. We, we in Texas we did develop a Texas statewide playbook that with ischemy and a number of people I know Jews was instrumental in kind of in putting that together and writing a lot of it. In Texas I saw a couple people from Texas in Texas that resources a great one for if you're building an OER program on campus. That's great. And maybe the final question here is from Una in the chat for Regina and Nathan what can you say about funding going forward. It's important. Right. Yeah, it's just something you have to keep fighting for and I know that again at our institution James does a great job of, of trying to push that forward through the career education side we get a lot of dedicated funding coming down through career education. So I'm also trying to use that funding stream to support faculty development of we are or in our case, the redevelopment and the updating and the constant work that is required to keep all of it in line with our industry partners, what they're demanding. Can we clone James I wish we could know that would be the best ever. I'll take one. And if we can call Regina and Nathan to that would be wonderful as well. I could use that. I was I'll say we're, I think we're really fortunate in Texas. In other states there are state grants that are available that funding looks like it is solid and is continuing. And the Department of Education Open textbook pilot grant is continues to be refunded and even increased. And they're getting to a place where they're encouraging smaller dollar amount so I think this is a great opportunity for a system or district or some collaborators to in community colleges to to apply for some development funding through Department of Education. But I think it's really important to get some kind of institutional funding, get yourself a budget line somewhere that is dedicated to we are super important. Absolutely a budget line that is dedicated to we are the strategic plan statements or some sort of statement in a guiding document also helps as well. In the several minutes that we have left I do want to have some wrap up slides to share with the audience. But I want to say thank you to Regina and Nathan so very much for sharing your work with us, sharing how it's gone for you, and particularly sharing your challenges because it's important for us to hear the good and the bad and because it allows us to learn as we grow together. What should we do what should we avoid what should we not do and that sort of thing so please audience. So thank you to all of Regina and Nathan a round of applause. You can use your virtual emojis if you'd like. Thank you Regina and Nathan. So I'm going to share with you a couple more slides for the audience. We have, as we mentioned at the very beginning this is our final webinar so congratulations to a wonderful robust lineup throughout the entire fall and spring semesters for CCC OER. We will be back in the fall with more webinars. If you want to take a look at all of our webinars, particularly the spring ones that the URLs are all there for your viewing pleasure so please take a look at it when you can. And stay in the loop. Keep in touch with us and so you learn more about what's going on in the CCC OER world. So we've got a community email that you can get information through. We've got on our website that there's a get involved menu that you can see some upcoming conferences. If you want to read more stories impactful stories about our EDI blog posts and our student OER impact stories. Go to the CCC OER website. And then last but certainly at least Liz had already put this in the chat. We want to know how was the survey. Let us know your thoughts or how is this webinar. Let us know your thoughts on this webinar. It really truly helps us to know the feedback so we know what what to do next or and how to do it for our future webinars. So I thank you all again for attending. Thank you again Nathan and Regina and everybody who contributed on chat and vocally so I we appreciate your participation. Have a wonderful rest of your semester and good luck. Thank you so much and it's been such a pleasure to be here and you two Nathan it's been awesome. Thank you guys so much. Likewise Regina.


I'm Megan D., and I'm here today to talk to you about the role of hand lettering in a contemporary design curriculum. And a lot of that is because I work at Virginia Tech, and they want to emphasize technology and the latest and greatest of everything. So I really strive to contextualize this with authenticity. So one of the biggest challenges of teaching a hand lettering class is getting students to create authentic designs instead of just following trends. How often do you introduce a project, only to see your students immediately turning to Pinterest for inspiration? While there's nothing wrong with creating a mood board or trying to see what else is out there, what I really want is to push students to dig deeper and go beyond mimicry and into research and refinement. So when I talk about hand lettering and calligraphy, I don't just want students thinking about Etsy style crafts. I want them thinking about the origins of language and contemporary designers and how to explore with form and materials. Even though I know much of this technically doesn't fit within the term lettering, which is why the next time I'm teaching this class, I'm calling it experimental typography and hand lettering, which also has calligraphy in it, but whatever. But when it actually comes to calligraphy and lettering, there is a certain amount that isn't meant to be unique. For instance, if you're trying to master a copper plate, you need to practice, learn hand skills, and study existing forms, perhaps eventually developing your own variation only after spending a tremendous amount of time honing your skill. Here while calligraphy might be about perfecting creation of form, designers all face issues of originality. What's the line between plagiarism and parody? What's the difference between inspiration and appropriation? Retinart has a lovely article on the comparison of these two pieces entitled Paula Cher, Herbert Matter, and Swatch. Was it plagiarism or parody? The article starts off, after the flames of modernism became mere embers, the design community wanted to turn to something with more warmth. People were after something more comfortable, a song buried in a memory. So designers of the 80s began looking back in order to move forward. But at least in Paula Cher's case, she got in contact with AIGA and Matters of State in order to get permissions. In some of my other classes, I sometimes even assign a project in which students research and assign designer, study their design methodology and their grid systems, and then they design a poster emulating the work of that designer. However, these pieces are never meant to stand on their own. They're more of a way to get students to remember a designer through making. I think of John Ruskin's view of drawing as a way of seeing, or in Elaine de Baton's words, from the art of travel. I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one did I begin to appreciate and remember their identity. Through making and recreating, students can better understand a designer's process or by spending time drawing letters, they can truly see their forms. Yet I want students to find inspiration beyond the most famous designers and through their quick Google searches. So I kick off my class with a hand-lettered syllabus, and then I take them over to the Special Collections Library at Virginia Tech on the first day of class. Here they can see beautiful original pieces, such as pages from illuminated manuscripts and books that are hundreds of years old. I also encourage this exploration because in the words of T. Boer Kalman from Good History, Bad History, the historical lens is both a way of seeing or including, and a way of not seeing or excluding. When we look back at eras that are beyond personal experience and memory, we become more dependent on what we see through that lens. What we don't see, in effect, doesn't exist. So I want the students to know that there's more to design history than what was curated by Phil Megs or whomever wrote their textbooks. And I think this also fits into broader issues of inclusivity, particularly if you think about who tends to get put in the history books. But I also want to get them to feel the specialness of fragile paper, of textured leather-bound books, and of seeing the raised gold leaf, and also seeing how letterforms shift through time periods and across regions, particularly before the internet. Things really look different depending on where you are in the world. I want them to think about the development of letterforms alongside the evolution of language, writing, and culture. I took all the M pictures because I'm Megan, but often the first assignment I'll give in hand lettering is the creation of an ornamental letter. I assign each student a story by the brother's grim, and they are tasked with creating first a hand-drawn ornamental letter, and then later on a digital iteration. I start by having them sketch many different ideas and then teach them how to develop those through trace paper iterations. During this assignment, I'll have students read chapters four and five of Phil Megs' history of graphic design, focusing on illuminated manuscripts, and I bring in reproductions from the book of Kells. Yet I encourage students to find contemporary solutions to this assignment, as they have a plethora of tools at their disposal. And in a contemporary design curriculum, hand-lettered elements can be integrated into all sorts of pieces, like posters, websites, apps, signage, and packaging. Additionally with this project, I like how students get to spend this much time on one character or symbol. And playing with these stories can bring letterforms to life, such as by twisting the tail of the big bad wolf into the L of the little red cap, which you probably know as little red writing hood. And the digital component of this project also gets them thinking about how they can apply these illustrative and lettering skills to other sorts of projects. It can create a foundation for larger projects that students can develop after my class has ended. So throughout the course of this semester, I sprinkle a lot of lettering and calligraphy exercises. And the one seen here is a cray-lig-ra-fy exercise by Tierney. And part of the reason I'm showing this example is I have a lot of lefties.  But it's also, we do a lot with the parallel pen and the pointed pen. And this can be, if you have frustrated lefties, try this sort of thing. But when budget permits, I like to raise the bar by bringing in experts. For one year, I got to bring in the talented Joey Heneford, who got students working at a beautiful large scale, where they could really begin to understand the relationship of letter forms to the gestures of the body. She starts them off on paper, working with the structure of Roman capital letter forms, so they can understand geometry and proportions, of which I've seen a nice extended variation in the book, Calligraphy in 24 Hours. She then moved the students to a large scale, which freed up how they moved their arms and let them see the detail of the forms. From there, she demonstrated how to do numerous other alphabets. And they just sat there drooling over her drawing letters on the wall, which I think means I did something right, or I broke them. And she also let them play with a bunch of her tools. There's so much about what we do where they're not going to get to be experts at everything, but it's nice to just let them see a little bit of gold leaf or to see some of these tools. And if they get inspired, maybe they go off on their own and dive deep. I've seen others that do variations of the large scale calligraphy, often done in water or chalk. And I've heard of some people doing this just to get their students out of the classroom and into the space. Then, hey, look, campus, there's graphic designers. But all of these studies get back to a basic understanding of the relationship to the human form. They also get students to look more closely at letters. Most of my students will not leave my class and go on to become calligraphers, but nearly all of them will work very closely with type and creating letter forms by hand gives deeper understanding to the similarities between letters and my strokes vary from thick to thin. For the projects in my classes, I often integrate current issues and I try to shift some projects each time I teach it. For example, in the fall of 2016, I used the AIGA, get out the vote prompt, and had students hand letter poster design solutions promoting voting. Although apparently our 20 posters didn't quite do the trick. But also the first class I taught after the 2016 election, I introduced an exercise in response to some of the conversations I'd heard and had on campus. One student from my class, who's the daughter of immigrants, had come to me the day after the election and told me I no longer feel at home in this country. This interaction inspired me to give the assignment small acts of kindness in which students were asked to spend a few hours creating something handwritten that integrated an act of kindness for someone, either friend or stranger. My hope was to focus on positivity in spite of all the hateful rhetoric and the us versus them sorts of fighting. But also to remind students how if you have control over beautiful lettering, all you need to communicate well is a writing utensil. Seen here is my student friend's note she gave to a friend. And my student Corey, illustrated tiny bookmarks, went to a bookstore and she snuck them into her best loved passages of her favorite books to create a nice surprise for strangers. Another challenge I'll often give students in hand lettering is a group project. It is difficult to get a variety of individual styles working together cohesively. So for the project seen here, we did an installation on stairs and windows, I guess this is just the stairs, but integrated an Ira Glass quote who'd been a speaker at the Moss Arts Center earlier that year. A different year I assigned the group project with the prompt of creating a visualization for the circles of hell as described in Dante's Inferno. One group solved this problem by creating a contemporary magazine focusing on greed, lust, and other examples in popular culture. Another group created an artist book which had a page for each layer of hell with a unique patterned border on each page which was based on the relevant sins and punishments of that layer. And this piece overall integrated hand lettering, screen printing, and laser cutting. And the last interpretation of the Dante project that'll show was this group which created a wine level for each layer of hell and chose more full bodied reds for the most treacherous sins. One of my favorite aspects of hand lettering is that you can do it on almost anything. So I'll often give prompts to letter upon physical objects. Seen here is an example of a longboard and another of a guitar covered in the lyrics from Castles Made of Sand. But students will often interpret letter of physical object in a number of ways. The student on the left was obviously influenced by her internship at Kroger Grocery Store and the one on right is how we somehow ended up with a 50 pound concrete ampersand in our studio space. And while I find it hugely important to teach history, form, culture, and context alongside hand lettering, I'm also OK with sometimes just focusing on joy and on play. In the words of one of my favorite designers, Alan Fletcher, pleasure also fulfills a function. That sentiment combined with the fact that we usually have an awkward two weeks left after Thanksgiving break, meaning I don't know what to do with that time. I'll often give a small project where students design a card of their choosing. They're asked to create a design that incorporates hand lettering, but one that can be reproduced. And sometimes I talk about what I think makes design and versus art or those kinds of things. And one of it is not that you can't have a one off design, but as designers it's nice to think about reproducibility, whether that's digital or print or other. They also have to hand letter an envelope and send someone a copy in the mail. And sometimes I'll have them do tiny animations. But overall, hand lettering allows designers to create typographic forms that would be difficult to draw on a computer. Teaching lettering to design students can help reinforce typographic principles and can show how letter forms relate to gesture and to motion. Lettering can also bring a more human touch to the cold glass interfaces in our digital era. So thank you all for your time.