Good. All right. So welcome to our communities and the first law of Drupal Dynamics talk. I'm Lisa McCrae. We've got Jack Garrett on the end there. We have Ashraf Abed in the middle. And like I said, we only got half an hour, so we're going to jump right into it. So the first law of Drupal Dynamics, knowledge is never lost, it just changes form. So when we started putting this talk together, we were thinking a little bit about how the three of us were like a microcosm of Drupal in a way. We all got here from different backgrounds, took different paths, but our differences only made the Drupal community stronger. That reminded me a lot of the first law of thermodynamics, which is the one about the conservation of energy. Regardless of where you came from, people with many kinds of skills, abilities and backgrounds are valuable in the Drupal community precisely because they bring this other knowledge, not in spite of it. Obviously, we're not alone in this idea. Dries talked about it this morning in his Dries note. It's more of a given, really. And the interesting part is how we keep the community growing and bringing other new people in. So let's focus on that piece. We'll each start off with a little bit about our own backgrounds and how we got involved in Drupal in the first place. We'll share some of our own personal ideas of how to help the Drupal community continue to grow. And then we'll wrap up with a set of hopefully easy to remember guidelines for your own efforts. So I'll start with a little bit about me. I've been in tech for a long time and worked in a lot of different areas, kind of a jill of all trades. I can put together a plausible sounding career path. And if there's any UXers in the room, they'll know that humans are really good at rationalizing their actions after the fact. But in fact, I was never a Stacey. And Stacey was a girl in my fifth grade class. And I don't know why I remember this, but when they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, Stacey said, pediatric anesthesiologist. And I was just like, what? Not only did she know, not just a doctor, but she knew exactly what kind. And I doubt that very many of us are Stacey's, but we're kind of encouraged to be. They kind of make it sound like if you got to have a path and you got to know where you're going. You might have seen this quote from Lewis Carroll about if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. And a lot of the times when I see that, it always seems to have kind of a negative connotation that, oh, well, any old road will do. But if you don't need to take a specific road, just think of all the interesting ones you can go down and look at. And that's kind of what I did with my career. I was kind of all over the place. I came from an engineering background. I worked for really big companies. I worked for some smaller companies, government contractors, did some teaching. I did all kinds of stuff. But some roads don't always turn out so great. So eventually I found myself becoming more and more stressed and anxious. It tipped over into depression and I was practically a walking what not to do, according to Sheryl Sandberg and the lean in movement. I cut back hours and levels of responsibility at work due to family needs and I was still burning out. Eventually there was a reorg. My job was cut and boom. Now what? I started interviewing and discovered that what I already knew was no longer enough, was a little stale, I needed to re-skill. And worse, as I was interviewing, I was being told things that fed every single one of my own self-doubts. The quote up there was one that I had that just, it was really terrible. I bombed that interview and at the end of it, the person interviewing me said, well, I think we'd both agree. While you were doing development, you weren't really a developer. Okay, no, I didn't agree with that, but I didn't know what to do with that. And I was really kind of lost. So I spent a long time thinking, I seriously thought about dropping out of the tech world, didn't really seem like I had a place and I didn't really know how to find one. I did decide eventually I wanted to be here, so what do I do? The key for me was personal connections. I had a former coworker who told me about some email list serve thing. And I signed up. And somewhere on there, it led me to information about Women Who Code in Washington DC, which is where I'm from. And that connected me with this super active, super supportive online community. And the more I was around them, I would find out about other opportunities and places I could learn things. Eventually I heard about this Debug Academy program. And I thought, you know, there's a lot about that that sounds good for me. But I don't know this. I've never heard of this before. Well, I had a personal connection in that group who told me about it and she could vouch for it. She'd actually taken the training herself. She knew it was a quality program. So after I got in touch with her, I said, well, okay, let me find this out for myself. So that's how I ended up getting involved, taking some classes with Debug Academy, and getting into the Drupal community. Shortly after finishing my classes, I got hired by a company in the DC area doing Drupal work. And after a while, I even had the opportunity then to come back to Debug Academy where I am now to help others learn. So yeah, things worked out eventually for me. But when I think about how I got started and what would have made it easier, the biggest things that helped or that I wished I had were supportive communities to point me in the right direction. That was one I actually think exists already. The question or the challenge is really more making sure that you can find it. Clear on ramps. Can I tell where to start? Like, okay, I'm interested in this. Where do I go? How do I get started? Who do I connect with? I feel like there's a lot of that that's happening. And the more I can get involved with that, I'm going to want to definitely do that. This one, Drupal welcome wagon. I think there may actually be some programs in process for that. And I'm kind of looking for it. But it was sort of like, if you're completely new and you're looking for a way to get involved, just people who reach out to you and say, hey, here's some stuff that you might want to know. Here's some, let me show you where things are. That would have been super helpful. And the emphasis continued integration on different types of people doing Drupal, not just developers, not just content people. I mean, that's one of the things that I think is nice about this year's DrupalCon is the fact that there are multiple groups there. I'd like to see them get even more connected together and have even less separation. All right, so I'm going to turn it over to Jack now. It's a little bit abrupt, but I want to keep things moving along. So those are sort of my own personal things from my experience. Thank you, Lisa. So my name's Jack Garrett. I'm a Drupal developer at Tobog Academy. But for most of my vocational life, I've been doing the humanities. I've been studying history really for 12 years, four of that in undergrad and eight in graduate school getting my doctorate, going to Germany, studying German colonialism in Africa and the slave trade. So this is a very weird experience for me making this career transition and suddenly talking at DrupalCon. So this is, once again, a little surreal. But what happened is in 2017, I eventually finished my graduate school and had to enter the workforce. And essentially, I kind of had to take a look in the mirror and decide whether I wanted to be a journeyman across the United States being an adjunct and trying to get a tenure track position, which is increasingly elusive, perhaps unicorn-like. And I taught at private schools for a year. And last February, so I guess 14 or so months ago, I started doing web development. I just learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And totally by accident, I found Drupal. It was like, what is this? This is a content management system. And as I finally started digging into it a little bit, I realized I could leverage all of those previous skills and put it in a nice little complete package and make some really interesting websites with some of these entry-level skills that I had built up for the past four months. Since then, I've built some nonprofit sites, worked on Drupal TV, and then even some federal government websites, which this is kind of like, for me, is mind-blowing how quickly this change has occurred in a very good way. So the question that I am currently struggling with is, OK, I made this career transition like, now what? Do I suddenly just drop my identity as a historian, something that I've been working towards for a lot of my life? And of course, no. You just don't drop your research and all of these ideas that you have. But you want to incorporate it in this new career path. And so for me, I guess these two bullet points is, the second one is what most people think about is, OK, I know how to build websites. Do I want to go into module development or theming? However, I kind of wanted to take a step back and think about how I could reach out to some of the previous communities that I inhabited and think about making new kinds of websites, new products, or taking their ideas and using what I'm learning to create a collaboration, something that would make me grow as a web developer, not even necessarily learning new skills, but taking those ideas, their research, and putting something together. So this is the interesting part. How do you get cantankerous historians interested in Drupal? Yes, there are digital history programs. But for me, how I was thinking about it is getting individuals who are just leaving PhD programs, people who want to get their research read and get them on a digital platform. Yes, they might be published in academic journals or monographs, but they want something else. And so I had to translate some of those Drupalisms into their jargon, speak in their terms, which for me was actually kind of fun, thinking about how do you take a dissertation and make it like a Drupal product. So for me, at the end of the day, when I'm talking to historians, it's really about content types. And that seems very basic or simple, but historians think about primary documents. And Drupal wants to give the information meaning. Historians look at documentation, and they have to interpret the past and give it meaning. Like these are things like their ears peek up when I say these things. So this seems like a promising path. So it's really just explaining really how Drupal thinks and connects to what they're doing. I mean, that's not really all that surprising, but in practice, I think that can be challenging. So just a little separate slide here. So talking about historians in Drupal, and there's already an existing conversation happening called digital history. This isn't just like history of digital media, but an actual discipline that uses digital methods to convey the past. And so for me, this was, all right, I want to engage into an existing conversation into this community that I had kind of since left behind in some ways. There are a few different ways of doing digital history. You can kind of read that up there, but the second one to me is most interesting. Is how do you make academic research accessible to everyone? Not only just for kind of historians to get their research out there, but for people, lay people who aren't necessarily reading the cutting edge history research, you want them to be able to access this. Or as a history teacher, how do you get high schoolers to be engaged in the past in varying ways? So I had to think about a little bit, or what does Drupal offer out of the box? And so this is the getting historians interested in Drupal. So I've already mentioned the content types, which for me is the beating heart of Drupal, but then also organizing data and giving it meaning. And then displaying it dynamically, whether you're using views or kind of locations on maps with custom map markers. I think for humanities professors or people engaging in meaningful research, there's a lot to offer out of the box here in Drupal that isn't necessarily a big customizing data or a nice project, but something that speaks to one niche of like an oral history program and making that accessible and used in Drupal. So to kind of come back is the point of this part of the presentation for me was to really think about what were the communities that I am or was a part of and engaging in some interesting conversations with them. What does Drupal offer them? And then conversely, what are the projects that I can grow as a web developer using their ideas? So not necessarily learning a new technology, but them bringing something new for me to work with. So it's not, yeah, like this new hot technology like React or something like that, but oh, this cool archive they found. So I wanted to like display that data. So I'll leave it at that and pass it on to Ashraf. Thank you very much. All right, hello, my name is Ashraf. Ashraf, I'll pronounce it properly. I'm the founder of Debug Academy. My journey to Drupal was a little funny. I think they all are somewhat. But before Drupal, I taught myself web development, at the age of 13 I was in a good place, lucky to have access to the right technology and build some websites. Eventually I went to college, not at 13, but I went to college and I really disliked it. I hated being assigned homework that was going to get thrown away at the end of the day. That that's just how I looked at it. And it felt like such a big time investment for, you know, like I said, assignments that just didn't feel practical. Eventually, like I said, I dropped out, I re-enrolled, I felt the pressure from society, I had to finish the degree, re-enrolled and I got my degree in electrical engineering, which was great, but I felt like I didn't know how to do electrical engineering, you know. So I ended up going back to software, getting a job in software. And throughout that, through that job, I was waiting for a clearance. And basically my manager came and said, hey, we started your clearance process.  So we're gonna put you on unpaid leave. If you could find another project in the company, we'll, you know, start paying you again and you can go to that project. So in that time, I was fortunate to be called by a recruiter, random LinkedIn recruiter. And they basically said, hey, have you heard of Drupal? I knew they were a recruiter, I was like, why do you wanna know? So they basically said there was an interview in three weeks and they wanted to know if I wanted to participate. I had not heard of Drupal, but three weeks was plenty of time while not working. So I picked up the pro Drupal seven development book and I pretty much read it's cover to cover. Three weeks later, I was able to land that job. So I was able to learn Drupal. Of course it helped, I had a background in web development, but I didn't know why we used Drupal. I read this book, which was all about this is how you make custom modules, this is, these are content types, et cetera. I was like, why would I get this whole framework just to make it more difficult for me to write custom code? I wasn't aware, essentially of the contrib space, I wasn't aware of the community. The book didn't talk about the community. So I really just knew that people were willing to hire for Drupal developers and they had a hard time finding them. So I ended up getting deeper into the Drupal rabbit hole. I ended up getting a job at Acquia after a couple of years and that's when I started to realize, oh, there's more to this software. So I learned more about Drupal.org. I learned about the community. I got all of those certifications, Grandmaster certifications at Acquia. I got to work on some really cool enterprise websites. And I learned essentially the proper way to build a Drupal site and I felt really bad for the clients I had worked for before. I really wanted to go back and rebuild their sites. Thinking about all of that, the fact that that company hired me, it's not necessarily that I tricked them. They knew I had a web development background. They knew I was willing to learn and they had no other Drupal developers to pick from. So I kind of realized, if I was able to land a job in Drupal just after a couple of weeks of studying, I have a lot of friends and family who also don't like their jobs or are in a bad situation. If companies are so desperate to hire Drupal developers, can we enable more of these people who are in a bad spot to get into the industry? So I essentially tested it out. I posted on Facebook and said, hey, I'm teaching this programming language. Anyone want to be a programmer? You can just come take it for free. And it was for three months, part time, in my house. I had a lot of funny stories out of that dynamic because it wasn't people I was necessarily close to or people I knew very well. But it worked out. We had people who started careers as Drupal developers, people who had not had programming jobs before. And to this day, it's really cool seeing how things have changed for them. So I moved on. I pushed forward with the idea, created Debug Academy and put a lot of time into essentially creating jargon-free education teachers. I tried to combat all the things I didn't like from college. We do real projects. It's not a repeat project. And it's very welcoming and inclusive. We're not just selling Drupal for the sake of selling it. You have to talk to people and see what their backgrounds are and how it applies. And I've been fortunate. It's been just naturally diverse. It might be that some of the community, family, friends I've had fall under the diverse category for tech. In the current semester, we had 40% of the class being women who enrolled. I do work to reach out, but at the same time, I'm not doing anything ridiculous. It's just a matter of making it a welcoming environment and sometimes convincing people that the doubts they have, while maybe based in legitimate things, are not as significant as they might think they are. You have to fight their impostor syndrome with them. So our ongoing efforts to essentially help in this department as a company. So now I left Acquia. I've been running Debug Academy for about two years. They're a handful of things I try to live by. And these are things that other companies can do. I try to hire people for their first droopal job when possible. So if I need a developer for something, I might know this person was really amazing, but they have a job somewhere. I'll try not to hire that person. I'll try to hire someone who maybe had potential. Maybe they're in a job they really don't like and maybe minimum wage job. Maybe I could swap out that income and hire them for this and give them some time to learn. Also, reputation is a really big thing. I'm fine right now, but there are many people who take the class who their name is not out there at all. So whenever I see an opportunity to patch, I just submit a patch to Drupal. I reach out to alumni and I say, hey, you worked hard and you don't have a job yet. Let's get you to submit this patch. Or if there's a speaking opportunity, last year at DrupalCon I was able to invite one of the alumni to speak with me. And essentially the idea is the whole concept of extending your privilege. I'm privileged in many ways and I see first hand that many alumni from our courses will go to a job interview and based on how they look, the interviewer will come talk to me and say, hey, that guy, he seemed a little shady. And I'm like, no, he was quiet while black. That's not shady, it's your biases and I'll tell them, you are being unreasonable. I was there, I know this person and I'll push back and I'll make them uncomfortable because other people can't do that for themselves necessarily without losing the opportunity. So if you're in a position to do that, to extend the privilege, it can have a huge effect. I've had people come and tell me, we've been holding off on having kids because we couldn't afford it, but now you help me get that job and now they have two kids and it's something they didn't foresee happening. I've had people tell me, we've had so much back pain because I had so much back pain because we used to move, lift things, have your machinery all the time and now I'm just building websites at Booz Allen. It's pretty significant. There's not this artificial community to help with. It's really individual people you can focus on, see how you can work with them one-on-one and you can really make a big difference for them and for you. You, of course, gain a friend, you network and it always pays itself back. Towards the beginning I was thinking, whatever, worst case scenario, I start Debug Academy for a year. It doesn't work out financially.  I get to say I had a company for a year. Not a big deal. But I found that accepting people who can't afford it for free or telling them, wait till you get a job. You can pay me back. Doing things like that have, over time, actually paid themselves back because people will come back and say, hey, I got that first job. Thank you, I'm looking to switch. Now I can refer them to a partner company, get a referral, or they'll go to a company and other people in that company, maybe a secretary will be there and say, hey, why do you get to work as a developer and I'm a secretary and they'll tell them, well, I took this class. So these things tend to pay themselves back if just helping somebody was not enough. There are other good things that come out of it. In terms of looking forward recommendations, it would have helped me a lot if the community were discoverable, maybe even through Drupal itself, through the admin interface, you just say, hey, new to Drupal, don't know the community, it's a big part of this. So right on the admin status page, report status, et cetera, you can have something there, pointing them to the community, maybe pointing them to a YouTube clip that's just like, here, get to know Drupal, it's more than code. In each of our companies, wherever you work, look to hire and train beginners, they can bring a lot. And when I say beginners, it's not necessarily young people, it's beginners to Drupal. So just look to bring people in with different backgrounds than your own. And we were able to bring Drupal TV to the community, Drupal.tv, it's this free resource embraced by the Drupal Association, which allows, which is a centralized location for all of the conference videos. So you'll find this one and conference videos from pretty much all of the Drupal events we know about. You'll be able to discover those for free. For going forward, I'm hoping that we can make events easy to discover on that platform as well, because I personally don't know when events are going to, when the session submissions start, when they close, what's coming up, where it is, et cetera. So centralizing some of that information, potentially including a way to access it through Drupal itself, I think those would all really help. And as a person running a company, I've been fortunate to hire Lisa and Jack and have them join the team. And I get to cheat, I get to work with them in class and then see how great they are and then hire them. But really, it's spectacular, like the different backgrounds, what every person contributes. I'd say I'm very different from both of them in terms of my background and style and personality. And I love that in hiring them. We now work as a team where we each bring something very different, but very complimentary to the table. And I think the Drupal community can benefit from that on a wider scale if we expand these principles. We all have really different backgrounds and really different approaches. And it was really hard to figure out how to sort of pull this all together to summarize at the end of our presentation. So it seemed like a good way to do it was sort of to go really high level and say, okay, so here's some ideas that we had and we've told you about them as things that would help bring more people into the community. And if you were thinking of doing the same things, it might be easiest to think of it. There's like three different really high level ways that you could structure your thinking. So I'm just gonna go with these three right here. Make a space. I've got the little Pac-Man guy there. You may have heard this.  The picture of the Pac-Man there with the little, there's a wedge missing. There's a clear space where you can go in and you can get connected. So if you're trying to think of how can I help new people join in, we'll look around and see, is there a space? Can I help make a space? And that could be anything from adding links on the admin UI to say, hey, the community's over here. This is how you can get into it. Just at a real high level there. Okay, so now you've got a space. Here's a space. It's a little scary. Not everybody really is gonna wanna go into that space. So just because you have a space, it's not if you build it, they will come, right? So think about what in your space might make people reluctant to go into it. And is there something that you can do about that?  Let me go ahead and address this so that more people might feel willing, I don't know, willing's not quite the right word, but they might be interested in joining in. And the last thing I'm gonna say is offer guidance or maybe better to say make guidance available. Some people just need a map. Like, I kinda know what I wanna do. I'm here in the space, I'm okay with it. I wanna go over there. Just help me figure out how to go there. So just hand me a map, I'm good. I'll go off and do my own thing. Other people will do better with a more guided approach and have someone actually helping them, you know, mentoring or something like that. Let me help you move along the line. And a lot of the things we've talked about, you could see that they fall into these different groups. So are categories, I guess. So making a space, making it not scary, and then making guidance available to the people who are looking for it. And that's the best way that I can think of to sort of summarize the approaches that we've talked about here. And I'm only 38 seconds over time, check that out. So we're gonna wrap up and thank you very much for coming and listening. We will mention, in case you haven't seen this already, Contribution Day is Friday. There are many different ways that you can get involved. There's mentored contribution and first-time contributor workshops. And of course, there are also surveys and providing feedback. So please let us know, let Drupal Khan know. It would be awesome to get your information. So thank you so much.


Good morning to everyone present here, first of all. So I thank my head of the department principal and the management of PSG College of Technology because of them I think I am being here. So I am from PSG College of Technology Dominic Savio, senior lecturer working as a in department of information technology. So computer programming syllabus, even though it is common in all branches, still some mild variations may be there like for IT and CSZ and for other branches. So here we can see the syllabus for ID department. So I think it is normal and as usual like programming languages, C, control statements, functions, arrays, pointers, structures, unions, files, preprocesses and these are the textbooks as usual I think. This is normal which is followed in most of the universities and colleges I think. I think this stands for the number of hours allotted for that that is totally 42 hours. So this is the evaluation pattern we follow I think since it is an autonomous institution for all UG courses we have this type of pattern 50-50 and out of this 50-50 this theory test that what we called as a it will be taking average of best of 2 out of 3, best 2 out of 3 and that average will be taken that 30 marks theory test and remaining 20 marks it is left to the staff member who is handling the paper. Because of this particular paper C programming for laboratory 10 marks quiz 5 marks assignment 5 marks has been assigned and still it may vary from teacher to teacher it is not compulsory. A teacher can follow anything else as she like they can sometimes they may give a package development in C and so on or some video games and it depends upon the department it depends upon the staff member who is handling with respect to them it will vary that is 20 marks and the end semester assessment that is 50 marks and these are some lab as sample lab experiments and normally what happens is like we have totally 3 hours theory session to our lab every week and each week some problem sheet will be given which may range from 5 to 10 problems like these are some sample problems again this may also vary from teacher to teacher it is not necessary or compulsory that it should be it is common and some of the in particular like other branches like mechanical, trible, EC, IC and so many other departments are there except C, EC and IT those departments I think it is handled by maths and computer applications department C language. So they may be having some common problem sheets which they may given advance as a Xerox material or else they may put an intronet I think I do not think they are putting in net common course it is common course still as I told for IT and C, EC some mild variations may be there in syllabus. The syllabus is different for some mild variations may be there because what happens is that other students that is other department students they have a feel that why we have to put more pressure like IT and C, EC students to learn these type of C programming that type of feeling they also have. So as a result I think management has decided I will have a separate syllabus for IT, C, EC and other engineering branches this is one more sample sheet. So it varies from teacher to teacher and as I told earlier model question paper I think this is the continuous assessment which I was talking about 30 marks this earlier the system was different and now they have changed earlier it was for 30 marks itself the test will be for 1 and half hours I think now they have squeezed the time to 1 hour 10 minutes and the test will be connected only for 20 marks and this 20 will be converted into 30 for the sake of for that 30 that is this this what happens currently they are they want to actually planning for some change still in discussion because this is common for all UG courses like and this internal question paper again the teacher is going to say who is handling the paper and this is for its compulsory and this we give 2 into 6 2 questions it is compulsory they have to answer only one choice. So this is a sample beta question paper I think we have courses like even BSE also in our college MSC, MCA and so on that is UG courses we have some common pattern a PG I think I do not remember the pattern I think it is flexible enough in the sense the teacher can set his own standard and so on and this is a pattern that is 10 into 2 20 marks and so on 2 2 mark question will be having and then this is 5 into 6 30 marks this 30 marks it depends upon the staff members who is handling the paper 30 marks is allotted you can go for 4 into 7 and half or whatever else he likes you can go and you can include a or b or sub sections again it is left to the teacher this is sample question and we have objective that is one mark question and this one mark question what is the beauty is we give this question paper that is in particular one mark only after 2 and half hours in the end semester exam. So first 2 and half hours they will be writing only group 2 and group 3 that is this that one mark question they will be answering only at the end of that is last half an hour totally exam I think it is for 3 hours and normally I think we have a practice before after taking the question paper some committee has been formed and they scrutinize a question paper and so on and our lab IT department we have 144 notes I think normally in our lab we are not so many students are not using Linux they use only windows and we have a new network lab which has 16 notes that is the lab facility we have and thank you any questions you do not keep the material on internet you keep it only on intranet most of it but would the old question papers be available as soft copies in the department actually what is happening is there is a in intranets of they have a digital library something in the library these old question papers they are making it available old style old question paper old question papers this I would like to request everybody if your college or university has a mechanism of having old question papers because old question papers are out of copyright they are public information and it might be useful for us to start with a complete set of all those problems is like what students may call guide books but essentially developing an answer giving reasoning much more than the guide book giving multiple ways of answering the same question or even for objective type questions not just pointing out the correct answer but giving a reason why that is correct answer you agree that it would be useful so I will request all of you that wherever you can get soft copies please mail them to Kalpana wherever old copies or whatever and if any permission I think is required I will be glad to write to the authorities but I don't think that should be a problem for old papers even if you cannot locate old papers but you lay your hands on books which are published by outsiders which actually contain question papers hard copies I could get them entered here you know it's not a problem but I think I am planning with something like five to six thousand questions not just objective but detailed questions and their answers to come out of this collaborative effort now for that I should have a ready made set of problems stated at least very good so I will request all of you this is an action item will note later that will mail these things the second point I made this is a pedagogical issue you mentioned that the other students feel why they should do so much of programming because programming is perceived to be for computer science or IT people in exactly the same way that computer science students feel why should they know more about thermodynamics that is part of mechanical engineering but at least the engineering and science education at the entry level works or designed on the premise that every scientist or engineer must know a few basic things about all topics in fact earlier at my time when the Indian course used to be five years duration we used to have two years of common courses it doesn't matter whether you have to become an electrical engineer mechanical engineer civil engineer you had to know something about all engineering necessarily the second point is some students are permitted to change their branch after first year I think in our college they're not permitted straight jacketed once you're branded civil engineer you have to be a civil engineer and therefore you must not know anything about computer programming the top most civil engineers particularly in the structural design business are far better software engineers than many computer scientists I have seen they are required to be so their problems today cannot be solved so you I would like to request you to go back even I think my other department is mechanical engineer yes then he did his MS in computer science in the US and completed the point I'm trying to make is you must impress upon all students and the teachers that they must not dilute the programming knowledge given at the entry level to any student the dilution may happen at the BSC first year because the maturity is less but at MSC first year or be first year I think they should be expected to do that personally I don't see any reason why BSC first year should be any less because whatever you have described sorry for this digression but is this not the philosophy everywhere that a computer programming common course is common for all students right that's right that's right but for our purposes a syllabus such as this could be very easily guiding factor because I'm seeing again and again and again that the first course syllabus is almost identical in most places so as we discussed yesterday day for a slave we will concentrate on that as the syllabus now what I saw is distinction between the number of hours that are allocated to different topics at different places there is slight variation and if possible if you could just concentrate on this aspect that is or maybe we'll do it in my session that we'll just go step by step and everybody will ask how many hours at your place how many hours at your place we'll write down each and then we'll try to decide what should be our approach I think that would be best okay thank you sometimes now we have been seeing most of the time the other branches students also will be appearing for the placements in the in software firms and it would be very difficult if they are not if they don't have a good background in computer programming and basic concepts so initially itself we'll make them understand that it's very very important for them in case if they would prefer to attend some placement interviews in software firms so the in case I'll tell you IIT for example the placement situation last year was bad universally but it was not uncommon to see in forces hiring 120 people TCS hiring 200 people not a single computer science person there's computer science rule don't want to join TCS and in forces they want to write compilers but when they come for the first year no they always target their core core companies and all then later on they understand that it's quite difficult and they switch to the software firm but I think the point is mad he also said that he did not approve of this position but he was just stating the realistic life as it optes there because non CS students they have the problem is with the students mindset just like I will tell you this is just reverse the situation computer science students do they take thermodynamic seriously do they take workshop seriously I will digress for two more minutes to tell you an incident which happened many many years ago you remember the computers used to be horizontal earlier they became vertical at some point in time the first such vertical model was brought to my lab and my students had opened it up and all that that film had done is you had just put it Ulta like this the legs were fitted here the power supply which is the heaviest unit was on the top now the cards the electronic cards which would be put today you got a single mother about doing everything or single chip doing everything those were not the day so the cars which are like this there's a fan behind and the fan is throwing air the air circles is good now when you invert it the fan is at the bottom and the airflow is blocked by the first card itself there is not enough airflow above when I saw that instantly I realized this nonsense I asked my students it don't you see that something is wrong with this they move around they said no sir it has been working for last two days now in an air-conditioned life any god damn thing will work so I asked them where what about the center of gravity so one student asked me sir this is a computer meaning computers are not supposed to have center of gravity then then he realized I said where is the power supply then students are smart they figured out yes sir it should be at the bottom common sense at least then I said what about the heat flow and you know the remarkable answer I got this beat a computer science student of IIT Bombay toppers from JEE all across the country okay heat flow sir that is a mechanical engineering problem I will have nothing to do it effective now this is a mindset of the students and I think as teachers particularly as first year teachers it is important for us to convey to all students that we teach that look this bifurcation of silos has been made only to handle growing body of knowledge and respective fields the real life problems never come with a stamp that I am a mechanical engineering problem I am a electrical engineering problem I have come to say I have a problem solve it and basically we're training people to be problem solvers now this emphasize is not written anywhere in the syllabus there is no subject which emphasizes this part so I think that has to be the responsibility of the teachers particularly first year teachers so my humble suggestion is that while we concentrate on computer programming at this course but we should emphasize this part wherever discretely indirectly possible and the subsequent courses for example thermodynamics is going to be covered by my colleague Professor Uday Gaito national expert so he also says the same thing that many non-mechanical engineering people think thermodynamics is useless whereas according to him that governs life actually that is the peculiarity every teacher of any subject genuinely believes that that subject is most important in the world all other things are secondary and that only proves my point that means all subjects are important anyway so this is something that we would like to remember and this is the reason why if you recall what Professor Ranade said he would not like to start a lecture saying we'll discuss arrays or we'll discuss pointers say we'll discuss a problem and the opportunity that we have as computer science teachers is much more than anybody else we can actually take problem from any field and use that problem to illustrate to students that look problems from this domain this domain this domain can be solved using thank you Dominic thank you sir


great. So welcome everyone to our June All Members meeting. This is kind of a big one of big meeting. This is you know we have now about quarterly meetings with all our members but this is the one where we have received feedback from many of you on how things worked out for you last year and also what you would like to see in terms of activities and programming for next year. So this so we're so glad that you were able to attend in person or if not to listen to this later. And we've got a lot of great information. So this is kind of our agenda. I think Liz sent this out when she sent the registration but you get to meet our new Executive Council. So we have some new folks who have joined us and we're really excited about that. We're going to talk a little bit about the annual survey results. We just kind of closed out on that so we're still digesting it but thank you for all that great information and we're going to talk a little bit about upcoming events and then we're going to hear a little bit about what's happening with the parent organization open the open ed consortium which is always exciting and lots of great stuff happening worldwide. All right I do want to welcome our new members that came in in spring. I think we we got an opportunity at our March meeting at our March quarterly to welcome the folks from Northern West Virginia College, from Colorado, from Johnson County, and from Santa Ana College. So welcome again. You're part of our spring flight but in the last couple of months we got four brand new members and one is Readley College. Amanda Tainter is the representative there. She's the faculty coordinator for instructional design and distance education and also the student learning outcomes and she's been leading several really exciting OER projects. Amanda are you online with us today? I think she had a meeting today around early childhood education which she and Jennifer Parris from College of the Canyons in California have been leading a national effort on building OER for the entire early childhood education associates. So sorry she couldn't join us and next up is Christina Trunnell. She's the trails OER coordinator and trails is the library system there in Montana for higher ed. Christina are you on on today? Doesn't look like Christina's on today but we're really excited to have Montana join us and we hope to have more to share about what Christina is doing in the future. Next up is the Virtual College of Texas which we had Judith Sabesta here the executive director and they're really getting going on OER and have some exciting events coming up. Judith would you like to say hello? Sure how do you everybody thank you so much Anna we're so happy to be a part of of the consortium. Wonderful and hopefully next year we'll hear more about the great stuff you're doing so we'll stay tuned for that and the last new member I have to introduce today is Grossmont College which is in San Diego Eastern San Diego County and Dave Dillon is the he's a professor of counseling there he's been leading an OER internship program and all sorts of OER events on his campus he's also the author of an award-winning textbook called Blueprint for Success and you can find that at the Revis community it's about college readiness and success and it's been already adopted quite widely I think it was released last year and some of the folks who are on the meeting here today were peer reviewers for that so great a great asset and we're glad to have Dave and Grossmont join us. All right just wanted to mention our staff here I think all of you know the amazing Liz Yatta who keeps keeps us all together make sure that people get registered and handles all those questions that come up so couldn't do this without Liz and of course there there I am and I think I forgot to introduce myself so but I think you know I'm Una Daly the director of CCCOER and I believe we have Paul Stacy with us today who is the OEC executive director our parent organization Paul are you here with us today? I am Una it's nice to be here nice to see all the new members and to be part of this meeting thanks for inviting me. Well thank you for coming we're really pleased. All right and now I think all of many of you if not all of you maybe not our new members don't know this amazing person Quill West who is the open education project manager at Pierce College District and she is now I think officially our immediate past president she's been our president for the last four years and has been involved in just really every aspect of CCCOER and she's I believe she's going to continue as an advisor but she is stepping down from the presidency and we want to say thank you to her for her four years of outstanding service and Quill are you there? I am here and thank you so much for that that's very sweet it's hard to let go but it'll be fun to be an advisor. Great absolutely we we can't let go and I'm gonna let you introduce I'm gonna let you do the urine review slide if you would like. Okay yes please so we had a really big year last year you can see the most important the most exciting news for us is the number of new members we've had in the last year it's very exciting to have so many people joining our community and participating so heavily I'm not going to read this whole slide to you I just want you to see how much how busy our email list has been and how much work we've been doing in webinars. I also want to point out those 13 guest blog posts and I'm hopeful that next year we'll see more than that anybody in our community is welcome to suggest a blog post and maybe even help write it so we would encourage all of you to participate at that level because we need a really really vibrant blog to keep people interested and to keep sharing communicating with each other in an open way. Okay isn't it? And I am not the only person leaving our executive council so I want to offer a huge thanks and and much appreciation from the community to Curie Dolly who has been handling our website for I believe three years at this point Curie has been phenomenal at keeping our website active and up-to-date and just in good ways for people to interact. She was there when we made our new website and has been keeping it alive and well and Cynthia Alexander from Cerritos College was there trying to keep us organized in the beginning which was always very helpful she helped organize our membership lists she has helped to evaluate some of the resources that we've used she's just been a wonderful support person throughout her time serving as our board so thank you to the people who are leaving our board we were grateful for your help and we hope you get to stay connected to our community in some way. Thanks again. And now I get to introduce the new leadership which is always fun so I'm just gonna say how very very grateful I am to be able to continue to collaborate with Lisa Young and Sue Tashian I am so excited about where their the energy and the leadership they're bringing to CCCOER and I am already blown away by their activities so I'm just so excited and I'm going to turn it over to them to talk about the rest of the year because this is now their meeting. Thank you very much. All right thank you Quill. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Oh okay thank you Quill and I just saw in the chat yes it is taking two people to replace Quill so I'm really happy to be here I'm sorry that my I'm in an office where the webcam is not working on the computer but and I'm excited to serve on the CCCOER Executive Council as co-president with Lisa who I met at my first open-ed conference and learned all about the Maricopa Millions project. CCCOER offered amazing support to us when we began our first adopt open project back in 2015 and they really welcomed us in as new members and shared resources, training, connected us with the community. I don't think any of our projects would have been as successful as they were without the support of CCCOER so my goal is to be able to continue this important work of the community by listening to the needs of the members and really giving back and sharing my experiences so look forward to working with all of you. Lisa. Hello everybody I am thrilled to be here with you and I'm really excited to be working with Sue and the staff and the Executive Council of CCCOER. I have been a member of the Executive Council for at least the last four years and I've been engaged with CCCOER for much longer than that and I just love the work that all of you do and how what a beautiful community we have formed and I'm really excited to be able to work with all of you to move this forward to bring new members on and help them to grow their OER programs and to help all of us continue the great work that we're doing and so I'm going to move on to the next slide. Okay I was just going to say before we went on I wanted to mention that Lisa is from the Maricopa Community College Districts in Arizona for those of you who might be on the phone. Some people take this meeting while they're driving and she is the faculty director there at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College and Sutech Gian is the she is the coordinator of Instructional Technology and Online Learning at Northern Essex Community College and both have led big OER projects which we'll hear more about if you're not familiar with those later. Thanks Una and I would like to start by introducing you all to our Executive Council Vice Presidents and I have to wear the reading glasses so I can see. So we have Jean Runyon from Front Range Community College and she is our Vice President of Strategic Operations. We have Michael Mills who is from Montgomery College and he's our Vice President of Partnerships and they're doing a lot around strategic planning for CCC OER and making sure that our strategic plan is in alignment with the OEC's strategic plan so they're doing really exciting work for us. We have Cindy DeMica who is our Vice President of New Member Services and she's from Nicolette College in Wisconsin and she's going to be working with our new members and onboarding them into the CCC OER and then we have two Vice Presidents of our website. We have Kelsey Smith from West Hills College and we have Nikki Stubbs from the Technical College System of Georgia and they'll be working on our website continuing to bring you the rich resources that we have and possibly making some changes in the future. And I'm going to turn this over to Sue. Sorry about that. I'd like to introduce our Professional Development Committee and we have Regina Gong who is the OER Project Manager at Lansing Community College and Matthew Bloom who's an English faculty at Scottsdale Community College, Maricopa in Arizona and they are working on the Executive Council and then the Professional Development Committee. Phillip Ayanna from Alamo College District in Texas. We have Totsa Borm into Ruben Rung, the Coordinator of Library Services from Rocksbury Community College and Nathan Smith who is the OER Faculty and Residents and a Philosophy Professor at Houston Community College will be working along with them and they will be developing the webinars in offering professional development to our members. In the next slide. Lisa are you handling this introducing? I am happy to. Sue we're going to have a number of special projects that will go on and we've had four of our CCC OER members volunteered to work on some of these special projects. So we have Brittany Dudek from the Colorado Community College System, Elaine Farrelly Lord from Westchester Community College, Lori Beth Larson from Central Lakes College and Suzanne Joachim from Butte College and they'll be developing out there projects over the summer and will be working on those projects throughout the year and we will definitely be communicating a lot more about the special projects as the year progresses. So everybody we wanted to do an icebreaker with you all and it's really hard to do a virtual icebreaker especially when you have more than 30 people but we're trying something new so and I can we're trying something new and so you may recall in our March meeting we asked everybody what are you planning for the summer what are your OER needs what can you offer in regard to OER how could you collaborate with other community college consortium for OER members and so what we did was we took a look at what people were planning because everybody submitted it through a google sheet and we identified some of the trends that came through from the people that participated and we'll be following doing some follow-up to kind of match make the offers the needs and the offers in just the next couple weeks but we wanted to do something fun and everybody I just went to two graduations this week we're and plus you know the graduation at the college and so it's that time of year and we thought it might be fun for us to look at the superlatives of yearbooks like most popular most efficient in regard to those items that trended and so what you're going to be doing we're not going to turn the slide yet but we're going to introduce each of those trends and then we have a number of those superlatives for you to take a look at and then in the chat window because they're multiple choice in the chat window go ahead and put what you think the superlatives should be for that OER project so I'm going to turn it and I'm going to turn it over to Sue and I'm going to monitor the chat and she's going to talk to you about the different summer plans that popped up next slide all right so the first trend that we identified was finding funding sources so summer is a great time to secure a funding for an upcoming OER grant program or a project that you're interested so in the chat let's type in if you think that finding funding sources would be a most likely to succeed most innovative most impactful most promising or most realistic or feasible and funding sources could come from institutional support publicly funded grants department of labor state funding like New York and Georgia if you're in New York you have an easier time you would probably be most feasible or external funding from private donors and so we've got the votes coming in we'll give it another couple seconds if anybody else wants to pop up in their vote into the chat we got a vote for most elusive which we didn't include which is so true it looks like C is the that which is most prevalent the most impactful definitely all right and the the next trend that we saw was the OER review standard so what standards and rubrics will you use to evaluate OER that's being created you know at your institution figure out what's important to your institution adopt one of the existing rubrics you know to help ensure quality of the material is it accessible has it been peer reviewed how current is it so go ahead and type in which superlative you think looks like we're getting a lot of E's and D's so a couple of A's that can see couple A's succeed yeah because that would be a project that you could really start and finish absolutely and the next one was people were would like to establish faculty recognition awards so these could be annual awards to recognize faculty who promote you know or contribute to utilizing free resources you know to help lessen the burden on students use open pedagogy so it's nice to recognize faculty as a way to gain interest from other faculty so this was one of the trends that we saw and go ahead and start typing and if you don't know it both Sue and I are from New England hence the trophy yes looks like we're getting a lot of E's A's and C's so most likely to succeed most impactful and most realistic and feasible for those faculty recognition awards and the last trend that we saw were the research and statistics so the summer like is a great time also to finalize your data for the year gather information to report about the number of faculty using OER number of students impacted student savings student success meet with your IRB team so all of this data will help you to secure additional funding to support the work that you're doing and look like we got a lot of D's and C's most promising right any Lisa said we're going to be reviewing the projects that were submitted and hopefully matching people up to work together and collaborate and some of this work thank you so much uh Sue and Lisa that that was a lot of fun and yeah a lot of interest from people so all right and we'll summarize that at least if you send that to us we'll summarize that when we send out the archive sounds great all right thank you all right Cindy would you like to share about new member relations um hi i'm Cindy Demeika i'm the manager of open instructional uh resources at nickley college and i am also the vp of new member relations it is a new position that was just created this year so we are still working on flushing it out um but some of the main things that we've come up with so far that we want to work on this first year is to um work with the new members and advocate for the needs of the new members um with the council as a whole and for the membership as a whole um so i'll be working with new members as they come in to find out what their needs are and relaying those needs and advocating on their behalf there's a new member mixer held in december and we'll be putting that together i want to work with and encourage new members to present the work that they're doing within their institutions or within their states or on their own there's a lot of great work that's being done out there and i want to encourage that work to be shared on a broader level and there's also a new member toolkit that was released back in october that it's presented out to all new members but i really want to make sure members are taking a look at it and seeing if it's meeting their needs and if maybe we need to make a little few tweaks to it we can do that but i really want to work with the new members to see what they need from us and how we can help them succeed in their projects and in their initiatives and in their programs moving forward because i know cc oer really helped me when i first came in and knew absolutely nothing and that was only a few short years ago and if it wasn't for them we wouldn't be where we are now so i want to make sure that all of our new members get to that same place so looking forward to doing this and looking forward to working with all the new members and all the existing members so thank you thank you so much cindy and so cindy's been waiting for a list from us for all our new members from the last year and i think we'll be getting that to you this week cindy apologies on that and so she's going to reach out to any of you who joined in the last year to see how we can help support you yeah all right so the annual member results thanks for responding we had a little over half of our members respond which was really exciting and we're now going to have nicky stubs our covp of the website who was who was spearheading the survey tell us about what you told us so we hey everybody we want to thank everybody who did respond we did have 43 responses so give or take around a 50 return rate responses to the survey and this really helps us set the tone and the direction for this upcoming year's interests and activities so we're going to highlight the following four results so what activities were most appreciated what are your priorities for next year what collaborations would you welcome and then how else can we help you achieve your goals so the top four ccc oer activities were the community email which i think everybody can agree with no surprise there our monthly webinars which we hope everyone gets to participate in at some time throughout the year the collaboration opportunities that are available and the ccc oer website and case studies we also asked about your priorities for the year and these were your top four so the first the first priority that came in at right at 79 percent was individual faculty or departmental oer adoptions and the next one that came in at 72.1 percent was awareness raising on campus and for me when we saw these results i thought you know we're all pretty heavily involved in oer we would think that awareness raising on campus you know may kind of fall down the list a little bit but as quill mentioned i think that that'll always be something that we you know at the colleges are doing we're always raising awareness there's always a faculty member who hasn't heard of oer or is it knowledgeable of oer so i think having those two at the very at the very top of the priorities for 2019-20 for a lot of people is is very realistic and and i would guess to say that it may stay that way for a while. Collecting data on oer cost savings student outcomes faculty and student perceptions came in at 67 percent and then increasing equity through oer adoption came in at 65 percent and i think that's great that you know that is finally on the rise for looking at oer in regards to how it can solve some of the equity within within our courses. So we also asked you to give us your biggest lessons learned from your oer projects and we did receive some great responses from the lessons learned question. So these are just a highlight of a few of them so one was the need to branch out into more diverse options with regards to open pedagogy interactive instructional design modules and then continue to recruit faculty to adopt oer. Another one was very interesting it was take the time to clarify your own vision of open or at least your goal at the beginning of the process and i think this is a great takeaway for colleges who are new or who may be initiating new oer projects and then one person said that all of their oer work has happened from the ground up so a grassroots effort and getting involved in oer has been supported but not mandated by administration. The movement at their college was mostly faculty driven and they think that's why it had been so successful and i think most people will find that faculty support from the administration is a huge player in the the success of your oer work but even more than that you know having administration support but it not being mandated or a requirement is always helpful it's always helpful to know that administration is on board with oer and the work that you're doing and then last but not least somebody mentioned that not everyone is going to jump on board to do this it is important especially early on to focus on energy for those who do want to participate instead of trying to convince those who don't and i didn't say this but i feel like this could have come straight from me and i think many people who have been in the oer realm a little while probably feel this way as well you know it's it's easy to to grab those oer champions and help them spread the energy rather than kind of drag the others kicking and screaming and so lastly we had some excellent takeaways for new members who are initiating oer efforts at their institutions and then we did have some following suggestions for webinar topics so our webinar topic suggestions from the survey were properly licensing and attributing ancillary materials and mashups topics around quality assurance and rubrics of course data collecting and determining cost savings to students a general using oer topic was recommended specific to integrating oer into the different lms's that are available or remixing oer within the lms how to edit press books or an open stacks format and then attributing different types of oer within the lms and then last but not least someone mentioned a student involvement in oer so how are your students getting involved in your oer movements at their colleges so hopefully we can address some of these and offer some of these webinars in the coming year and then lastly we had a good number of responses of people who are interested in exploring shared costs either monetary or expertise for yep mic's going to address the slide if that's okay with you oh perfect but thank you i know you yes you put that information in um i just did you want to summarize before we move on to mic's slide um no i just i do want to mention you know if you are um if you are here with us and you forgot to do the survey or didn't get a chance to do survey um we usually push share mine um we do look at the results for this and um try to plan for the year based on what the needs of our community is yeah thank you very much nicky and that's a good point we'll put the link to the survey um in the chat window as well in case people miss that um liz maybe you can do that i at the moment i can't switch out of presenter mode but yeah thank you nicky for that really good summary um and i think um you know particularly i was going to speak to the webinars and unfortunately regina gong and math you bloom were unable to join us um this afternoon um it are uh there are professional development um vps co-vps and i'm not sure that any of the subcommittee the new subcommittee was is here either but this was a really good reminder to us as nicky mentioned that you know you continue to have new folks who are coming on board to oer and you need some of the basics and so we do provide some of that on our website as well but we will be addressing some of these issues in our webinar so that you can refer um folks in your uh at your college on your campus who who want to review these or are brand new to these um these concepts so thank you for that feedback and thank you nicky uh mike would you like to talk about this particular slide sure thanks unna all right good afternoon everyone um as you can you can see from this slide we we asked people about their interest in exploring shared costs and what we're trying to to look for is how do we leverage the power of ccc oer membership to benefit the members so over the past year we've looked at the possibility of different platforms that we may be able to use to share content for example so we've had communication and meetings with rebus we've talked to delmar larson from libre text looking at possible consortial pricing with press books all in an opportunity to leverage the power of our membership so that we can all benefit from what we're doing and what we have to contribute as a community of practice as you know we we all know there's still a lot of siloing in this space and by looking at these shared platforms it's an opportunity to reach out across silos and incorporate uh all the members of ccc oer so you'll be hearing more about this uh as we move forward in the upcoming year um but we thought it would be of interest just to let you know where we're going um and what we're thinking about and we welcome any suggestions or comments that you have yes thank you mike and those of you who said that you're very interested which it looked like was almost a third of the respondents um we will reach out directly to you and ask you for some more details um probably this summer um because um yeah we see this as an area where we could leverage our our membership you know our larger membership to get some to to add value to our members essentially or to our membership already um kelsey are you there i am hi everyone um i'm one of the new vps and my one of my tasks is to keep um up to date the spreadsheet we have going for the open educational resource conferences or anything related to that um so if you haven't seen it already it's under get involved and it's a google sheet so the past week i've been trying to keep that updated and then add any conferences um for 2020 so um on that spreadsheet we have the name the conference the link and then we've also included when the proposals are due by so if you're interested in getting a proposal out there please look at this spreadsheet and you can kind of see what's coming up um if you ever see a big conference that's missing from there please let us know we can get that added kelsey that's great yeah so we do try to keep um put in the regional conferences too if you let us know about your regional conference or you post it on the email list we'll try and pick that up and make sure it's in there as well see oh i guess i'm talking about this okay so the open ed conference is coming up and i know i hope many of you will be able to um attend that um in um in late october in phoenix um and i i know a number of you anyway are presenting um as well at that conference so we'd love to see you um and in addition we always have some kind of a social get together at open ed and um we're in the planning stages on that so we may get together for dinner or for drinks um during that conference which is a nice way informally but we're also um in the process of planning a state leaders meet meeting the day before open ed start so that will be uh the tuesday october 29th um and um we hope to launch um a state leaders advocacy group so um you know in the last few years we've had a lot more um statewide and system um large system organizations joined cccoar and so we're seeing a need to uh grow our community of practice to address those issues um and um so this is a planning meeting that is uh being that is it's a planning meeting being planned um sorry that's a little duplicative but um what we're hoping to do is meet with folks who are interested in those state issues those statewide issues and who participate at that level and develop some study groups um that will continue throughout the year to address you know all the issues that you focus on as a as as a statewide representative of who we are funding um different policy issues how to address publisher promotions that perhaps um uh are um not collaborative with the use of oer and and and looking at how to address that so the idea is that we would develop um you know a network of of experts in this and we already have some of those so that this advocacy group can either be a great help to a new member who's coming up and needs to find out about lessons learned with statewide oer issues and so forth or when new events occur when a new policy new legislation starts getting introduced across the united states as i think many of you know publishers tend to go state by state trying to get bills in which um help support various initiatives to um increase their business which sometimes is yeah is not a good fit for our students and so having a concerted effort where we know we can talk about what's happening in different states and kind of have a national um look at how we can support all of our statewide oer efforts and so we've already had interest from about 19 of you who work at that state level and um we'll be reaching out to more folks in the near future as we put this together but for right now it's we've we believe it will be tuesday october 29th and it will hopefully be at the glendale community college uh which is very close it's a i think it's about two and a half miles from the hotel venue all right can i answer any questions about that all right well we'll be in touch as we know more all right now i want to turn it over to paul stacy our executive director to talk about some of the exciting work that's being done globally thanks una yeah i'm sorry and i'm always so thrilled to hear about the great work of ccc oer and i love the the dynamic interactive aspect of the membership it's really wonderful to see um as some of you may know we're sort of the parent organization for ccc oer and as the parent organization one of our mandates is to support open education globally around the world and so i thought i'd talk briefly about some of the ways in which we've been doing that um one of them was to attend the um the big convening that q nesco organized my colleague igor lesko and i had had the honor of representing the open education consortia and all of our members at this intergovernmental meeting of experts that was brought together by unesco to review the draft open educational resources recommendation which has been a work in progress for about a year now um we made some significant contributions to the initial writing of that draft last year and this convening how that unesco headquarters was to review that whole document in its entirety uh with um representation from all of the unesco or as many of the unesco member states and some of the civil society observer organizations of which the open education consortium was one um and so that process was really kind of fascinating to watch actually i've never sort of been part of a convening at unesco before but there were a large number of member states and observers and a chairperson led everyone through a sentence by sentence paragraph by paragraph review of the entire draft recommendation including sort of the preamble but also the definition and scope of what open education resources refers to the aims and objectives of this recommendation in all of the the areas of action so the the draft recommendation has some very strong recommendations around these areas of action which include capacity building supportive policy inclusive and equitable quality open education resources sustainability models and international cooperation and so you have to kind of imagine there's a large room uh with uh with uh people sitting in front of their little sign that says what country they represent and the recommendation being projected on a big screen in english and french and then uh the chairperson leading everyone through a review of every section of that to get consensus about what it says and different countries could make suggestions for additions or revisions as could those of us who were observers and so certainly the open education consortia made some significant recommendations particularly as it pertains to policy and sustainability this is significant because the the recommendation was passed and adopted after two days of uh discussion and now in november it will go forward to the uh the 40th UNESCO general conference and at that event it will be presented for approval and adoption by all UNESCO member states and one of the things that makes this significant is that this recommendation is a little bit more binding than the previous OER declaration that UNESCO came out with several years ago and by binding i mean that there'll be an expectation that the member states who assuming that it's approved and adopted in november member states will be expected to report out against progress on the actions every periodic period of time which probably in a three to four year cycle so this would give us an instrument that we can point to and use to have countries sort of state and initiate things that help make progress towards those areas of action so that was actually kind of exciting um and uh and i think potentially it will have really significant impact it's a bit unfortunate of course that the united states is not a member of the united nations anymore about nonetheless i think that for the many countries that are this will serve as a significant instrument um so that's one example i wanted to quickly mention and a couple of others so if you go forward one slide una um we also host the biggest conference that's focused on open education globally so this is a little different than the one that happens in phoenix in that we're we're looking at open education in a global context and so this conference which will take place in melano on the 26th and 28th of november will will highlight uh open education initiatives from around the world and um the theme this year is open education for an open future and it kind of looks at all kinds of issues related to what the future might look like and some of the challenges that that future entails and how openness can be used as a means to to enabling a really uh successful future and it will address all of the major areas of activity around resources practices and communities and this structure of the formats this year are intended to be much more interactive than simply listening to presentations um and just while i'm on this particular one to quickly mention a few a couple of other things just very briefly una and then i'll pass it back to you um we also have been supporting something called open education for a better world which is an initiative that comes out of Slovenia from the UNESCO OER chairs but that initiative which many people aren't aware of is it is an online mentoring program uh for people developing open education resources around the world it has a convening that's happening at the beginning of july for all the projects and people around the world that have been participating in that and we've been delighted to have one of our staff acting as one of the hub coordinators for that whole initiative and we're also working with Centrum Sofrova which is in Poland to host and organize an open policy forum which will take place in Malta in october and this will be a fellowship like program involving a six-month period of engagement where people who are positioned to or are in the process of creating open policy can come together and receive mentoring support for writing that policy and finally i wanted to mention that on the global level we also as many of you probably know do awards of excellence for open education and the nomination process for that just closed actually and we we're really pleased to have received over 130 nominations from 27 countries and so the awards that we give out in those in all the categories that are part of that awards system are fantastic acknowledgement of the great work that people are doing around the world and so if you put forward some nominations thank you if some of you have been nominated i wish you well and we'll be announcing the outcome of that in september that's it from me Luna well thank you Paul um and it you know turns out we have a little extra time so um do questions for Paul um we've actually all been keeping right well let me squeeze in one more thing uh and that is that i've mentioned stuff that we do globally to support open education but we also do other initiatives regionally much like ccco we are servicing the community colleges of the usa and we recently launched a latin america regional note that's looking to do something similar to ccco we are but in the latin america region and so we have some really interesting activities happening there with with open education leaders from across 10 latin america countries that have come together to help create essentially a new community of practice supporting open education in that part of the world but let me stop there all right great thank you thank you Paul um yeah so it's very exciting um more work happening in latin america all right well um i'll go ahead and introduce the oec board members if that's okay i wanted to um or would you like to do that paul oh no go ahead that's great i i just wanted to say welcome officially to alexis clifton um who has joined the oec board um kind of as the ccco we are representative although of course she represents a little bit larger organization than just a 30 uh i don't know is it 34 or 37 alexis in suny and um the rest are 64 64 total total yeah and 30 about 30 of those are community colleges okay and would you like to say a few words alexis about um i know you're brand new but sure well i did get to go to the first um board meeting at oer 19 in um ireland galway ireland which was really exciting to actually meet all the new um board members and the returning ones um and if you ever need guidance and anything but especially related to the open education consortium paul and james are excellent um stewards of the community and very welcoming to new members like myself or new board members like myself um so i i really look forward to like i i like i appreciate the opportunity to be the voice of um connecting you know the ccco we are community colleges around this the country to the global conversation and um make sure that that all of our interests are represented in that forum and barba you've been a huge help to and i appreciate everything i've gotten from members past and present and look forward to getting um continuing with that with our next board meeting this in july what is that the next one coming up so thanks thank you alexis and yes um thank you for mentioning barbra alowski who is a former board member um of oec and continues to be a huge cccoer supporter in addition to being a co-founder of cccoer so uh yes thank you thanks thanks for that absolutely i'm so excited with alexis joining the board she's going to be absolutely amazing and and i i just want to say how i think we're we're so fortunate to have her on the board it's really wonderful and and to also be so appreciative for james is eight years on a board which is longer that some people stay at their current jobs so thank you for all your leadership as president of the board treasurer of the board vice president and all around active board member thanks barbra yes um and thank you for introducing james um and i think some of you may not know but he was actually our first cccoer president when we joined oec he went on to the oec board and many years of service so james uh please say hello and hey everybody thanks so much unna thanks uh barbra and alexis for those kind words it's it's been a real treat for myself uh to have provided service to cccoer and to oec as well uh it's been incredibly gratifying to see the growth and membership of cccoer whereby uh community colleges which once were really unrepresented uh in the oer world now comprise the largest membership block in oec and for those of you who go to open ed in north america you you might not know but six seven eight years ago there really were almost no uh community college people there uh and today you can't turn around without bumping into a lot of community college folks so it's been incredibly gratifying and of course i want to follow on paul's mention of the global open education awards uh mentioned that both barbara elowski and quill west our former award winners at the global level for their leadership as educators in oer representing again all of us in the community colleges and last year a special treat was at a former student of mine from college of the canyons natalie niller was the first uh our recipient of the global student award so that's been again just just gratifying to see the growth in uh in community college participation um and so it's been a lot of fun for me i i'm not going away i'm going away from these formal roles but i'll still be very active in in the open education community more broadly so thanks everybody thank you james and yes james has agreed to continue to provide an advisory role and um we're we're very pleased about that all right liz i think this is your slide okay thanks unit so once again we just want to say thank you to all of our members um i know we we couldn't say hello to all of you individually but we appreciate all of you um there are some ways for you to get involved with ccc oer um first one is case studies um some of you um said in your annual survey that you would be interested in submitting a case study so we're currently redoing our template a little bit so we will be reaching out to you later this summer to um get you started on your case study you can also suggest a blog post we have um an ongoing blog post about equity diversity inclusion we also have a lot of blog posts about regional conferences so if you have um any first please let us know you can also suggest webinar speakers we always need a lot of speakers and we'll be starting our planning our fall webinar series over the summer and then as kelsey mentioned we have a list of conferences on our website there are you know lots of cccoer members and cccoer staff that attend different conferences all over all over the the world um and we do have meetups at major conferences especially open ed we had a dine-around town at Niagara Falls last year in the um and then the year before that we had a breakfast celebrating 10 years of cccoer at open ed 17 in anaheim which i got to go to and so you know we look forward to working with you more in the future thanks very much liz um that's the end of our formal part of our meeting and so we'd like to open the mic to anyone who'd like to share um something related to oer or um something related to the topics at hand you know this is mic yeah just a a quick comment and we've thanked all of the executive council members new members but i want to give a special thanks to you for helping lead this organization and keep us all straight sometimes i feel like it's hurting cats but you do a great job and just a public acknowledgement for your work thanks mic i'm glad my camera's off you'd see me blushing um it's um it's a great job and i really enjoy working with everyone so thank you let's see if we are we've got two minutes left would anyone else like to share something that's happening on their campus around oer or maybe a success that you've had this year that you just kind of like to uh share with us lory beth asked is there a listserv or place to connect before oe global uh this is james i'll suggest twitter for for better for worse if you're not on twitter uh and you're involved in open education uh you i really encourage you to get active on twitter that is where the open education community is so uh you'll find a lot a lot of great connections there yeah thank you for that james do we have the hashtag for oe global yes i know i should know this um perfect yeah so for example yesterday a lot of people i think uh yesterday or two days ago the uh notifications went out of uh the conference proposals that were accepted so if you go on twitter and look for the hashtag oe global 19 you'll see lots of people uh excited and celebrating the fact that their their proposals were accepted wonderful thank you for that um and um cccoer is doing a um an action lab so with about five of our members who wanted to do an action lab on how to build your own oer community so we're pleased a bit to do that well lory beth if you have any questions or um want to chat before the conference i'm more than happy to chat with you about the conference and um i'm going to be going so there's there's a number of us that will be attending and happy to um connect with you beforehand thanks this is james i'll say the same mary beth absolutely be happy to happy to connect yeah thanks thanks to you both and um um for those who are attending we'll try and have some kind of an event where the community college folks get together and um so stay tuned on that um and um lisa or sue if you want to share your email addresses um if you're comfortable with that if you share your email addresses maybe um in the chat window so people do want to contact you about um those things that would be yeah thank you lisa all right well thanks everyone great meeting um and we're looking forward to um talking with you more um in the fall we'll be doing a fair amount of work this summer so uh we will have a fall quarterly meeting um about some of the strategic planning that we're doing this summer and the outcomes from that and um we'll be in we'll be in touch over the summer but it'll be a little bit lighter because we take a break from our webinars and we won't start those up probably till early September so thanks again and um have a wonderful summer