Hey, welcome everyone to agile in the finance and accounting KPO world by Ken and Sayali. We are glad that both Ken and Sayali can join us today. Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the part of the world, a very warm welcome from both of us me and Ken. So let me introduce myself. I'm Sayali. Sayali today from India. I have an agile coach with Metro Global Solutions on a professional front and an art lover on a personal front along with being mother to two teenagers, husband and in-laws. And Ken. Yes, my name is Ken, Ken Viras, here sitting in Germany, Dusseldorf. And yeah, my title is head of transformation innovation. So I'm doing partly agility, new way of working, also doing a lot of key account management and project management here in from Germany up and leading the team in Pune. Yeah, on the private side, I also love doing paragliding. So next week, if everything goes well, I can do another paragliding session in France, hopefully, hopefully the weather plays along. Super. All right, thanks Ken. So today we will share our experience of our transformation journey in the finance and accounting space in the KPO world. Oh, let's begin. So do you know which metro we are on the screen, you will see three metros, metro shoes, metro wholesale and metro parade. So let us check via Mentimeter. Please click on menti.com and use the code. You can add it in the chat link also directly, you can use that one. Otherwise, if not, yeah, like society said menti.com. And then there is a code. In case the link doesn't work, but ideally, otherwise you can write also in the chat. In the chat box. I'll stop sharing my screen so that you can share. Let's see. Yeah, metro shoes we have one. And then we have metro cash and carry. No one selected metro the train. So far. If you want also in the chat you can. You can add it in case the link doesn't work. Have one in green check. Yeah, I see it also. If you want to tell you can reshare, I can just say the numbers. Say it again. You can reshare the PowerPoint slides again. Yes. So basically B is the correct answer. All right. Yes, yes. Okay. So we are this, we are this metro metro cash and carry. To the whole sale business. With the restaurant owners. So this is what we are. So I hope you remember us as this met. All right. So who are we. We are metro business solution center part of it. And we are born out we call ourselves that we are born out of a global giant. We call ourselves a global startup with a, you know, very traditional customer. So the entire process started into 2011. Where we wanted to kind of disrupt Lee innovate the finance technology. So transform a manual scattering, you know, accounting organization into a holistic, robust organization. That people process and technology at the center. So we have reinvented ourselves. And that's how we are now called business solution center. We believe in more in learning organization being a learning organization. So that's how our transformation journey is all about. We have a presence in Germany and India in India we have two offices in Pune and in Bangalore. So the motto is that, you know, we have a global vision to be a fluid global team. We save that way. And our customers spread across the world. So handing over to Kent for some more pieces of information. Yes. Yes. Basically, most of you came here because of, can you share the screen. We're talking about the knowledge at the KPO right so knowledge processing operations. And, yeah, and that's why we also wanted to show can you share the screens early. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. If you go to the next slide. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yes. So we said like why KPO I was also Siley when she brought it the first time. I was like, Oh, are we in the KPO because for us it was just okay. We have a project and we were looking at this. And yes, we are looking at the finance and accounting area. And, and then you could say, Hmm, this area isn't it. If you will look at the next slide, isn't it very clear that it's a very, you know, from our Stacy matrix, which we love and agility, isn't it in the simple area down there. So why even bother to think we should do agility in this area. But if you can see also, if you look at from the KPNG pictures, which is coming up next is that right, everyone is being affected by digitalization. And surely also the finance area is also getting affected. Since also a lot of RPA automation is coming in, which we also then attended to do. And there's a lot of regulation coming where now it's not paper anymore. It has to be digital. They have to show and so on and so on. This is making it more and more. It's not in that simple area anymore. And now it's starting to move. Right.  So it started there. It was simple. Then it went to complicated. And then we realize now with adding more and more digitalization and also the automation. It became actually more and more complex. And then we said, for this, we need some transformation in the finance area. And we had a lot of first thing. We talked with the CFOs in the countries. Also here in the board member in Düsseldorf. And we said, like, we definitely need to change something because how we do it until now it doesn't fit anymore. And then all of these elements basically ingredients came together. Realizing, yes, we, we need to renew how we interact with our customer. And here we're talking internal customers. So as a country, we're serving them. So here we have to see how we can do it differently. We look at also on how to do the reduction in the process and the plans. And then surely now, since it's not only the country and Pune, but we also have the digital department, which just needs to be involved. We said, we cannot just have one times meetings, but we need to create a cross functional and a self organized team. And then because we don't know what's happening like always, we need to embrace creativity. We have to see what else can we do the layer of management we wanted to reduce. And also then we said, we definitely need to collaborate more. And then all of this we said, doesn't it sound very typical that this is an agile transformation? Why don't we do it? And then we looked at the agile values. I don't have to tell anyone here your folks that what is it? So we were deep dive later. But we looked at the values we looked at the principles and then we were thinking like, okay, which part of it should we do. While doing this thinking, we realized, first of all, if we think of our customer, like with whom we are working in this KPO. So with the finance and accounting, we realized first thing first, like, if we look at actually where agility is normally being done in the IT industry, it's more like a food truck. Why am I comparing this because our customers is also normally hotel restaurants catering. So they buy a lot in the wholesale. So that's why we took this picture as a metaphor to say, in the software industry or in IT, we are used to changes, right? There is an update coming tomorrow, something else changes. So we are used to like this food truck. Now I'm standing here. There's this customer and now I'm the next day and moving somewhere else. It's a different customer. So it's quite comfortable with having changes. Maybe today it's in this city. In one week it's a different city. Maybe they buy in Metro store, but the Metro store is different in sometimes in different cities. So they're used to this, you know, feeling of uncomfortable. But if you look at now in the finance and accounting, we took the metaphor saying like it's more like a restaurant. People are set, you know, the process is quite set. The menu is set. Yes, maybe there are some special cards, but it's like the basis is set. So they don't like so much changes. We even had one stories here. We had a project since they've been doing a process in 20 years. And then we said like, ah, so what should I do here with the finance process? And I'm like, yeah, just print it out, put the sign on it, put the number on it and then send it back to us. And when they got it, they print it out again, write something in it in the scan again.  And that's why we said it's crucial that we really pick them up where they are and slowly bring them to this different way of working, which is agility. And then we said, okay, we really should emphasize on the upcoming ingredients. But we said, definitely we need to focus first on the individual interaction over the process and tools. And we also said like, we definitely need to discuss on my collaboration because before it was, you know, everyone was just there. The people in Pune, they were just doing stuff and doing it for France. And it was just being done that way and somehow it works. But they were not really talking. It was more like a contract. You have some SLAs and it was not really working together. And that's where we said, let's take the principles. We should work together. We should also invite everyone. So we also invited the CFO and all the head offs and so on, so on, or finance at the beginning to maintain that constant pace. And then we also said we need a team which works together closely because this change is not going to just happen. We need them to work very close. And then we have different teams who will also show later how it went. And this face to face conversations and also that we have the classical where we bring teams together and they can reflect and do retros. And definitely we need them to build trust because like I mentioned before, the simple invoicing which they had to, you know, print it, write something, scan it again, changing something in between. They don't like it too much. So we also like trust in this because automation was something new. All of them were like, yeah, we know it's coming, but we don't like it. So we also said, let's emphasize that we all together work on this. And it's not blaming each other and so on. And then we said, this is super crucial. We should do it. Yeah, and handing over now to Sally will share more about what we exactly mean with this in every step of our journey. Yes. Thank you so much again. All right. So for us as Ken mentioned, it was super critical that we analyze things, the current situation. So what we did we tried to analyze the current model working model that we were working with. And we realize why didn't it work for us. We had to give a thought to it. So there were meetings happening. There were hurdles happening. However, something was missing and which was collaboration that we realized. So the focus was more on, you know, who did what rather who didn't do it right. Was more of a focus. So it was a more of a blame game. So we thought that this need a change. This was more very, very technical meetings that were happening.  So if there was a absolute disconnect in everything. Of course, the byproducts were high attrition, no learning teams were not happy. This was the byproduct of all this. So we thought that, you know, we should we should do something. And this inspired us that Albert Einstein said that learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. And important thing is stop and ask questions. So, you know, we took a pause here, and we retrospect ourselves and solve. Can we do something better so that we can improve. That's how it instigated us to think more. And yes, we found our ways to handle the situation. We worked upon it, our working model and we thought that we should keep people at the center of the model, and then work upon. So we took the collaboration principle of us very seriously. We designed this kind of working model where, you know, there is a circular collaborative circles, where teams are working holistically with each other. So there is no me, me, me, my work, my team. It is not that it is our. So we move from me to we, and the circles had different roles were designed, designated to them. And with this we thought that people will start taking the ownership of their own own work, they'll start feeling it and then taking the ownership. So most importantly, we wanted them to enjoy the work they are doing, not just that nine to five typical job that they come they do and they go. So there has to be some involvement. And this is where we thought that this model of us, the circular model will work for us. And also, we thought that the hierarchy has to blur. You know, there is in the leadership we see we observe there is a control that every, every leaders, every leader want to feel it. So we thought that is also one of the factor that pulls the entire system down. And because of maybe you know there is no trust both the ways. So, this model did work for us. And the byproduct of course was the reduced attrition, I would say, and this overall the team started looking happier and the organizational organization became more productive I would say. So, we took agile values and principle really, really, really seriously when we started. So how do we do it but you know, we took it seriously how did we implement this, we know our pain areas now, and we need to overcome it. So, what we did is, we got approximately 30 people from three different countries in Pune. We put them together, and we organized a co-working week for everyone, you know, abiding the face to face collaboration or face to face communication we thought this will work. And it's not about only a gathering or doing all those come training sessions and team building it's it's not that we were focusing on the you know, human part of everything. Processes, you need not tell the KPO industry because this is very methodical industry they have six Sigma, you know all Sigma projects run here. So, that's not an issue here. The issue is the human connect that disconnect had to be, you know, sealed upon. So what we did is we got them together in Pune. Of course we talked about work. Definitely, you can, we sense that when everybody on the first day came in the meeting room, there was sudden silence, and still people were sitting in their own country groups, you know, they were still not gelling out. So, we thought, this is not working. So we took everybody out of the room, we went for dinners and lunches and heritage walks, and gardens and where not so that people mingle upon mingle with each other we travel you can see the photograph we travel in auto rickshaws as well. So, one of the incident I would like to share is Ken was a key person to do this is, we had been to Agakhan Palace in Pune, where Mahatma Gandhi Ji was present here for his fight for the independence of India. So, Ken asked everybody a question that this is the value for which, you know, Gandhi Ji was present. So, what is that for which value you will be present for. So, we never think that we will be present right, so this was very thought provoking for everyone that, okay, so the value started coming out, people started opening up, there was a big silence for some time. However, you know, the next day we could see a chair in the room, people started had started already mingling with each other. So, at times classroom or typical, you know, official work environment does not work. The human touch is really, really important for each one of us.  So, you know, even further, when we started. And people went to the countries and we started working the model had such a thing that you check in asking, how was your weekend, how was your mood, or how is your mood with which you are checking in. So then people started feeling that connect that I am important, I am also there. So people are cared about me they are empathetic about me, and this culture made a big difference. The challenge that we addressed is people, more on people. And this is how this a co-working week made a big difference in our working model. Yeah, to add to it. So basically in that, we even that moment when we were in that, where my Gandhi was prison, even some of the colleagues were, you know, having some tears because they were thinking of that deep, deep topic which they would go to jail to. And then we were also witnessing that other were sharing this. So this was like really the team building where we, you know, when we have that base which is very, we know each other and not knowing just, okay, what's your name and what do you like to eat, but to go to the deeper layers, it really had in the further discussions, because then if there's some difficult situation, it's not just, you know, you know, because you know deeper, it's not just like a colleague anymore, it's almost like a friend that you know, like, ah, that was important for that person. That's why they're actually sometimes fighting more in discussions because for them, this and this was important. So this was really the moments where we realized, yeah, taking that series to have a face to face, and really spend time.   And then now let's talk about work, but first the private stuff, but we also made sure that not every meeting now we, you know, overdid it and it's all the time doing icebreakers and having these questions. But from time to time and also from depends on the like, also with the head offs we had this where we really spend and then we can go to that levels discussing about deeper topics. So what is actually not working here. So that question is not just like, yeah, I'm blaming you but it's like, yeah, true. That's true. What can we do about this. And that's why it was super crucial what we're sharing next now. So back to you Sally's about how we changed of the whole structure of the of the teams. Yes, the basic idea for us was opening up the people. Because generally, they case themselves, you know, with the with their thoughts, the way they are. So this did help us a lot. And moving forward, how did we change the way we work and our structure. So this is the way we worked in the circle.  So people were also, I would say, when we integrated jobs, we created the rules. They were a little scared of it that will we lose our jobs in this, especially the middle management. So we had to create that awareness work upon it create growth paths in the entire circle, where we included the legal people as well. So this structure helped us in, you know, achieving our vision that on people front we have a global teams, which are created processes on process front we wanted to simplify and standardize the processes, and be, you know, solution providers on technology part we wanted to be a piloting enterprise with RPA for all the entire metro. So it was a big shift for Metro from becoming no pioneering partners from business providers to solution partners. So it was a big change. However, though, the global structure was done, unless we do day to day things, things don't change. I hope everybody, I'm sure other everybody would agree. So we do planning theoretically, you know, all the planning is done, but we need change that actually happens locally. You know, from the team, we all know these stages from forming to performing what happens. So we need standards, we need retrospectives, we need, you know, ceremonies are super important for all of us to be an effective team team bond is something really important that developed here. And especially post COVID this hybrid working model. It is a challenge that we found, you know, our team did actually did a fantastic job in getting the team together, conducting conducting these daily huddles, and their brainstorming sessions, be it building connections be it is conducting icebreakers and that to handling different countries. So the team has played a super important role here. And that's how, you know, we could achieve the vision that we were looking at. And I would. I want to show the toolbox that we used for for achieving this. So we tried to establish, you know, the new ways of working where we developed common okay as we had daily huddles, but where did we do all this so we, we, we all are into agility so we know we did maturity assessment, we did quarterly maturity assessment so that we, you know, in the iterative form so we keep doing it. We had planners with us. So we use the mirror board as well to conduct retrospectives mirror board I'm sure you must be knowing it's a digital whiteboard that we have. We used Microsoft Teams planner for handling the day to day task very efficiently. It worked for us. We had a channel for in the Microsoft Teams where we had created different types of tabs, the meeting invites were posted there. So basically what I'm trying to say is we created a one stop shop for the countries. The country had their own channels, they knew what is happening in the team. So no more they were working in silos, and they had every information available at one place. So this did help us and moving forward. So now that the teams move towards performing and we had few numbers. Now it was time to show our visibility and accountability to our Superbosses as well. Every country. This is the snapshot that we just posted it here that how did we do so we developed different KPIs for the countries we mentioned that how many scrum events we did for a particular country. Then these were the few KPIs that we developed for each country. So one was Transformation KPI, one was Team Energy, one was Teams Availability, Time Availability, Productivity and OKA settings. So this is how our Superbosses got the snapshot of it. And also the technical technicalities of it. How was the process improvement? Were any best practices shared? Was there any invoice extraction? All these technical things were also mentioned there. So in one slide they got the entire snapshot. If they wanted to deep dive, we had our scrum boards on Microsoft Teams. We had a retrospective on the Miro board. So everything was visible for everyone. So there was no disconnect. So even the leaders knew everything. Can you want to add something? Correct. And why, right? You would say, Oh no, but is it not over documenting again? Are we not going back into that all way of working? But here where we realize because it is the KPO area, so finance and control accounting, because they're used to, right? They're used to their nature of work is we trust is like when we can control, we can trust. So we also, they needed to know, OK, show us some numbers. So what do you mean with this, right? And then so we, that's why we, this is why we showed it to everyone here is the importance to still use that language which they have, so which they understand, right? Because we could have used a burned down child and burned down child and something like this, but then they would be like, what are we burning down, right? So it's more like, OK, no, this is the numbers and data you used to know. And since this was also digitalization and automation, so we knew we are going into that there's still invoices, which is going to be manual and partly it's going to be automated. So then they also wanted to know, like, is everything running fine because this is like there's a very specific financial impact, right? If this doesn't work out, we have to do something. And everyone was nervous anyhow from the beginning, like, oh my God, this is going to be bad and we're going to lose and like monies and we're going to be fined or whatever. So this is how we wanted just to show them saying, like, yeah, we are open and showing to everyone how it is going. And that's why we let's say use this old still reporting kind of style. So we will also later show some more this kind of where we just saw that is important to share because they're used to this. So we slowly pick them up and still use some of the old elements. Yes, thanks for adding that, Ken. Yes. So we saw the changes. The transformation was quite visible, I would say. And as Ken mentioned in his earlier talk that now the values were coming together. Now that we have gone through all that customer collaboration and everything. Now it was time to see the working product and responding to change as well. So, and of course, the result was expected result was satisfied customer working software, you know, we deliver frequently and consistently as well. So people responding to change or reacting to change, are they welcoming the changes, the team itself, are we striving for the excellence and is there a simplicity in our processes. This was a time to check on this. So, let's see what we achieved. You may, you know, see if you graph graphics here. So you may notice that automation rate, you know, increased as compared to the targeted automation rate in all the three countries. Our NPS score, that is the customer satisfaction score, did increase here. Whenever we have added the new roles, you know, be it solution owner, be it techno functional experts, you know, the ability to tackle the problem solving on their own. So we achieve this team design their okay hours and measured, measured it also to track the progress. So they did it, everything on their own. With this, we saw that the team spirit and motivation was absolutely on a high note, and they became more, I would say, self sustained. And automation moves away from, you know, from people dependent to process dependent. So it was no more of people dependent one which was a very happy situation for the organization and automation in all three countries became stable, which was super critical for the process. And of course the regular audit audit checks were kept us on track. Moving little forward. You may see these are few visuals where we can see good improvement on people process and technology front. So on technology front our automation rate increased on people front are quarterly maturity assessment showed us that there is an improvement in self organizing team. There was a good clarity for people had so we could achieve the transparency there and culture of the team as well. On the process front improvement areas were identified improvised and you can see our boards were stabilized which was super important for the team. Yeah, maybe just to add there right so this is I mean we know it in agility, like it totally makes sense and that's why it is like that. But since we brought people together there were so many new improvement projects right so many things popped up new because suddenly they sat together, and then they really really talk about saying like yeah this and this this doesn't work. And before they said it also. But somehow it never came right because the managers were meeting. They didn't really understand what the problem was. They just said something. So but since now all the relevant people the experts are sitting together. They could really say this doesn't work that doesn't work and then. Okay now I understand what you mean with this and they could really come up with new stuff. So this was really the power of being bringing everyone together which we know already but this is also then they saw that this works. And even today many times people who were in that group still they were like cannot we in different areas they want to also implement this way of working which is then more in that agility, which they saw and they want to do it. Yeah, so basically, that's just giving the overview of all that what we have been implementing so far. If we're right so we will see the next slide is just against we just basically we just took all the values and took all the principles, and just took them really serious and just said like, what if we really do it because many times in the in the training also before writers again we understand this, but do we really do it and we said yeah this time we really look at this. And we also saw that that's why that over is important right so individual interactions over processes and tools doesn't mean that we don't do it anymore but it's still super crucial that we still do whatever processes is there from the past and needs to be done because also in finance and accounting. There is always some legal stuff where we have to follow and then very crucial. And since money is going around also very crucial that everything works. So this is where we just took everything and saying like yeah we need to still follow a plan but we need to be able to respond to change. And yes we do have a contract negotiated we have an SLA how fast we have to deliver something with the, as an example invoices, but still we can collaborate with the customer and sometimes they understand, like I something's happening or we can now. They also now understand right I mean this is like simple but strength very strong is like, ah, before they didn't really understand maybe like how important some festivals were. And now they understood it more and they could plan it ahead and saying like okay the festival is coming up we understand that it's important for the colleagues so how can we manage it that it doesn't slow us down. Do we increase the volume before we do it afterwards, but everyone knew and understood each other better and could really work on it so there's no more blaming but it is really collaboratively working together and trying to solve always a problem. Yeah, so basically this picture is just to show right before it started. It was a restaurant now it's more becoming again a hybrid model of it so it can move, but it still has some stability. So, and yeah, the customer and everyone else is still happy working together. So this was the idea just to show that picture at the end, taking the elements but still adjust to that area because we cannot take agility one to one, which we are doing in the IT industry to other industries because they need some adaption, but we still have to be true to it because as we saw in the stories we were telling, it really works and yeah, that's why basically how it went. Yes. We would like to end with a quote that culture does not change because we desire to change it culture changes when the organization is transformed the culture reflects the realities of the people working together every day. So for us what worked and we worked on people. Thank you everyone. Hey, thanks Ken and Siley for sharing your experience with us today.


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Welcome everyone to the CCC OER webinar for May on the importance of student collaboration in OER projects and we have three colleges who are going to tell you about the work they're doing to include students in the process and to improve the process with those students. So it's really exciting to to hear about these. This is Una Daly, director of CCC OER with you this morning and very quickly here is our overview for today. After our brief introductions we will hear first from oh actually I'm sorry the agenda is slightly out of order. We will hear first from Philippa Naya and Lori Coleman who are at the Alamo Colleges and next we will hear from Trudy Ratke and Brian Weston at College of the Canyons and kind of exciting here Trudy is a student who works on OER so we're really lucky to have her join us today and finally we will have Megan Dempsey who is a librarian at the Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey who'll be sharing some of the work that her students are doing to support advocacy at her college. So I want to just take a moment to let everyone say hello and I think we're gonna start with Philip and Lori. Yes it's good. Go ahead Philip sorry. No yes it's Philip and I from Alamo Colleges. And I'm Lori Coleman I'm the OER coordinator and English professor and the chair of the OER task force. Great thank you Philip and Lori for joining us today and for those of you who are in the audience welcome to our event today and please introduce yourself in the chat window and let us know where you're at and anything any OER projects that you want to share with us in the chat window. So next I'd like to turn to Trudy and Brian to say hello. Hi my name is Trudy Ratke I'm an OER assistant here at College of the Canyons. I have a bachelor's degree in history and I'm a former COC student. And I'm Brian Weston I'm the director of distance and accelerated learning and yeah just happy to be here and to hear about the other colleges and see what everyone else is doing as well. Great thank you so much Trudy and Brian we're really thrilled to have you. And finally I'd like to give Megan Dempsey a moment to introduce herself. Megan. Hi I'm Megan Dempsey. I am the library chair and instructional services librarian at Raritan Valley Community College and I've also been serving as the convener of our OER faculty interest group through our Center for Teaching and Learning for the past year. Great thank you for coming Megan and she's got some exciting stuff to share about what her students are doing to support the work there at Raritan. All right Ellen thank you everyone for introducing yourself in in the chat window that's wonderful it's we have folks from all over the country. So I just for those of you who this might be your first time joining us the Community College Consortium for OER was founded 10 years ago and our mission remains largely the same expanding awareness and access to high quality OER for all of our colleges. And we do this by supporting faculty choice and development and these monthly webinars and other activities that we make available to our members are part of that. You know at the at the base at the heart of all of this is improving student success and that's what we've been attempting to do for the last 10 years and we're so glad that we can help colleges with that work. Here's a quick view of our membership map and in fact Raritan Valley is one of our newer members that joined us just within the last few months and so we're just thrilled to have them. They're located in New Jersey. We just had another college another new college join us in Massachusetts which is Massasoi Community College and I'm not sure if they're online today but we're very pleased to have them as well along with all of our existing members. You can see them there in the in the blue and red dots on the map. So I think we're going to get right to our speakers here. I just wanted to point out that kind of the threads of this webinar about the importance of student collaboration in OER projects. Often this is thought of as almost an afterthought. We often we're focusing on the faculty, the librarians, the instructional designers, the administrators who are helping to get this work done and deliver this OER materials to students and sometimes it's only later in the process that actually bringing students in is thought of and so it's really exciting to hear from some of these colleges and they're going to tell you their story and it's a wide variety but as I mentioned earlier Megan Dempsey from Raritan they're relatively new to OER. They've really been doing this for a few years. They've had one or two faculty who've been doing it and now they're really starting to rev up but their student government has been supporting them. So they're coming in early on this with having the students support that and it's really wonderful to hear that. We're also going to hear of course from Alamo College and how they're helping to create awareness among students and how students can have dialogues about what OER and free textbooks make possible for them and finally we're going to hear from the folks at College of the Canyons. Trudy who's a student there who works on collaboration with faculty on developing OER and she works for Brian there who's the director of distance learning and he has a whole team of students who work with faculty on finding openly licensed materials particularly images and with formatting open materials that the faculties are producing which is a benefit of course for the faculty but also for the students. It's a wonderful work for them to do and to understand this new open education model. So without further ado I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Philip and Lori and I will stop sharing my screen so that that you can share yours Lori. Great thank you Una. Okay so the the Alamo College's district OER focus began with the formation in the fall of 2015 with our district-wide OER committee and it was in response to the first charge by our chancellor regarding OER so that committee was made up of various stakeholders faculty librarians college administration Philip as the digital and OER coordinator for the district and led by the district's vice chancellor of academic success. So the committee worked through the summer of 2016 to revise the guidelines for adopting instructional materials to reflect the work that some faculty across the district had already begun with OER adoption. So by the time the committee concluded its work we finalized the instructional material guidelines a contract with our college UPS store for low-cost on-demand printing of OER for students who want that option was established and a plan began to tag courses in our district-wide schedule of classes so that students could search and select courses that are designated as OER or no-cost materials. So once the guidelines were finalized we received support from both our college president and our vice president of academic success with regards to growing the OER adoption on across our district but specifically on my campus San Antonio College that I'm going to primarily focus on. So our vice president then assigned the teaching with technology committee to take the lead so the OER task force was created in the fall of 2016 as a subcommittee of the teaching with technology committee and then I was named chair of the task force. In the spring of the of the following year the Alamo well actually the spring of that same year 2016 we joined Alamo Colleges joined the Achieving the Dream OER degree initiative as part of this eight-member Texas consortium and that work continues with Phillip as the lead and in the summer of 2016 the Alamo Colleges also became one of only 11 universities and colleges and the only community college in Texas selected by Rice University-based publisher OpenStacks to be a member of its national OER institutional partnership program. So this OpenStacks partnership was a one-year plan to develop a sustainable model and strategic plan using OER in the district and that work really galvanize our efforts to grow OER adoption across the district as well as the Achieving the Dream grant. So that in the fall of that year 2016 the task force received a charge from our vice president to conduct an inventory of current courses that use some or all of the OER and we were also charged to discuss ways we can scale up our OER use then to determine the barriers to those who don't use OER and come up with recommendations for incentives for faculty. Some of those have been accomplished with a faculty survey, a focus group session with department chairs and several workshops and then awareness events for faculty and students. Currently we're working on two videos to again spread awareness. We have a faculty showcase video that highlights four faculty on our campus San Antonio College who are either using OpenStacks or other open content in their courses in lieu of publishers textbooks and then we're also working this summer on a student awareness video that we have compiled from students within those courses and we're hoping to develop that over the summer and then finally we have some short two-minute videos that we're also going to create informational videos what is OER so that we can share those on our social media sites for the college. All right, Phillip if you'd want to take the next. Yes, one second. I'll start this by saying I'm actually lying down and I have a funny thing staring at me so I apologize for that. I can't hardly hear you just a little louder Phillip. I've been flying since 6 a.m and I got offered a bump so I took it and I have around eight minutes so going off of what Laurie said we focus on branding. We have a unique structured animal colleges where we have five independently brave ecologists and their identity is important to them. So Phillip if you'd like me to I can go ahead and speak on this slide if you'd like me to. Can you hear me? You're falling away a little bit and we can hear a lot of the background noise so I think that what what Phillip wanted to add about our branding is that he really took the lead to try to get some of the iconography I guess of what our institution and our district wants to use and create to get the message out in a visual way so you can see the brand at the top there of the slide the Alamo open slide this is for SAC because it has a red background with the book and over it we have five colleges in our district so Phillip created a variation of this branding for each of the five colleges as well as for the district based on our colors that were designated in our district and then we've been trying to develop the websites the district website here on the left is what Phillip's area focuses on and then our college website is on the left it's not easy to see but you could certainly go to the website it's if you search for Alamo College I'm sorry San Antonio College OER you can find this website we've tried to place on the far right column a place where students can click and see the courses that are using OER at SAC and also we have a place where students can find OER as it relates to their particular courses and so Phillip's goal is to replicate what we have at SAC as a model across all five of our sister or other four sister colleges by creating a task force and then creating more awareness through the involvement of those faculty who either already currently using OER or who have a desire to innovate and become part of that group the next slide shows you what again Phillip has been working on on his end we use the banner system and what Phillip has done has has to do with our class search schedule that students go to in order to find their courses so as you can see the students can search by subject they can search by course number or title and then they have the option to limit their search to only a specific college all colleges or multiple colleges and even the parts of the term but the new addition that you see down on the bottom is the location or attribute so Phillip has worked to create this alamo open no-cost textbook attribute so that we can help students again to find those courses that that they know they aren't going to have to purchase costly materials for and it's also going to help us on the back end to identify what kind of choices our students are making with regards to these types of no-cost textbook courses and that's also going to help us know what what kind of high impact courses are being maybe looked for by students who they know have these OER options and so finally the last thing we wanted to talk about is that oh I should have said I apologize I should have given some shout out to just the collection of data Phillip has generated this semester district-wide 240 faculty were identified as having adopted the low-cost or free instructional materials and we've estimated that this semester we've saved students 1.9 million due to the faculty adopting these no-cost materials and we're projecting that by fall of this year that amount will rise close to 5 million all right and so here you see on this screen the two campus events that Phillip led on two of our colleges one being San Antonio College and it was again an attempt to grow student awareness for the OER initiative so we pulled two strategies for the Oregon Open Student Toolkit on OER and you can search the internet for that toolkit Oregon Open Student Toolkit so we were hoping to harness the power of social media to shine the light on the student perspective when it comes to expensive textbook costs so in one event students were invited to write down on a dry erase board the amount of money that they spent on textbooks for the semester then on another board write down what they would have spent that money on and so several student responses reflected the economic choices students have to make that impact paying rent gas or entertainment one of my students who spent over 200 said he would have liked to give back his textbook money to his parents who could use it for homeroom modeling and another student who spent $300 said she would use it to buy shoes and clothes for her son and one student even expressed that her father lived out of state and she would have liked to use her textbook money to visit him and then the other event was the used textbook graveyard and we hope that this event would again shine a light on the impact that unnecessary new additions have on the use book market by setting up a graveyard for all the used books that can't be sold back so Philip made all of these instruments that were used in both events he made the gravestone shapes out of these outdoor sign materials that could be inserted into the ground and then students of course labeled the signs with the titles of their used textbooks that they're not they were not going to be able to sell back to the bookstores and in conversations at these events with students it was clear that the textbook costs were unavoidable and students realized that but they also realized that it's not necessarily affordable and that was an issue for for several of the students and then uh Philip was generous enough to give all the students who participated a free t-shirt and on the t-shirt it contained that alamo open logo to again promote this initiative and i believe i am done on my slides all right lovely thank you for sharing that lori and and philip who i think is now on an airplane and i thought what was particularly um fun about you know you did that event during open education week which was in march and yes so it's a it's a great opportunity to to create campus awareness among students and also faculty so really exciting and i know that you did that last year too that's right um that's wonderful thank you any questions for lori we will we will have questions at the end but we just have a few minutes here if um let's see oh we've got a question here from uh page wolf high page and her question was is alamo open just for oar does or does it encompass other free and low cost materials yes it's it's both both okay wonderful wonderful and it looks like you got a lot of folks who loved your textbook graveyard idea all right um now trudy and brian do you have control of the screen now i don't believe so we are all set wonderful so i'm gonna now i'm gonna turn it over to trudy and brian who are at college of the canyons in california thank you and i'm gonna have trudy for that first year great yeah once again i'm trudy redke former coc student now an oar assistant at college trudy could you just speak up slightly yeah absolutely thank you former coc student now oar assistant at college of the canyons and i work with a team of other students brilliant students who help instructors put together and design these oar textbooks and instructional materials great so the part i'm going to touch on is student collaboration in oar primarily in the actual creation of oar materials and my idea for this was making textbooks stick so how do we make textbooks that are affordable and free which is a big selling point in oar but also easy to access and easy for students to digest and not just a textbook that goes in one ear and out the other but something that they can use and reuse and get a lot out of great so i just have a little question up here why emphasize student collaboration in the creation of oar textbooks and i think the real idea is because students understand the needs of students when students have a voice learning is achieved so i think that there's a unique perspective that students bring into the textbook process especially because the textbook experience for them is still very fresh they're in school or they recently graduated and they understand the textbooks that they liked and they also remember the textbooks that they didn't like and maybe the money they spent on the textbooks that they didn't like and so hopefully bringing students in this process makes it better for everyone great yeah so it ensures that these textbooks are creative with students in mind that's kind of the key point great so now i'm going to talk about what i think is a general idea for what constitutes a sticky textbook what makes a textbook stick in a student's mind and i think that there's three criteria for that i think in general for a textbook to be a good choice for a student it should be affordable easy to use and understand as well as stylistic and design conscious so when we combine this general criteria for a good textbook and we bring in student collaboration we get this unique new spin on a textbook in the world of oar that i think is really really beneficial to current students great so the first thing i want to touch on is affordable um it's the easiest thing i think to talk about in oar especially because it is one of the biggest selling points of oar is that it's free one thing i do think that needs to be emphasized though is the free aspect needs to be emphasized to students i've actually talked with a lot of csc students when working on promotional materials here and when i bring up oar some of them many of them have never heard about it and when i explain that it's free textbooks they're skeptical they don't quite buy it um so i think it's really important for students to be made aware of the oar process it needs to be like a really a campus-wide initiative to help them understand no this is there is altruism in the world of education these textbooks really are free we want you to have access to them so that you have less of a burden financially in your college experience and one way that coc does that is that we actually put our textbooks up right on our website um a coc student can just go right to the website they can click on a textbook and download it for free also they don't even have to be a coc student since there's no login any student could potentially just peruse these textbooks download it if they wanted to um if they found the information was helpful for a current class they're taking whatever they want to do with that so the second criteria for these kinds of textbooks is ease of use so easy to find that kind of already touched on that coc tries to put our textbooks right on the website for students to access and make it really clear really easy but i think that another thing that goes along with accessibility or ease of use is is the information easy to understand can students digest it would stick with them um and i think that our team has done a pretty good job of that we worked on a water technology textbook water 32 um and sure actually we're gonna try to pull it up right now great so this is our textbooks page and this is our water tech textbook so i wanted to actually show this page first because this is a diagram that was created in photoshop by a former cocoer assistant named natalie miller so for this water tech textbook there needed to be a visual diagram of a water bank however at the time of this textbook creation no water bank diagram existed that was openly licensed so natalie had some tech backgrounds and tech experience and she went into photoshop and created this uh diagram specifically for this textbook and that's i think what i'm really trying to get out what i say ease of use is that this student collaboration oer when when students at a community college get to work with community college professors we get this cool kind of collaboration where people from a tech background or an english background or a history background they bring their skills to the textbook and yes the professor is writing the content the content is definitely coming from the professor but the coc student can bring in a tech skill like this and create something that is very unique and very specific for the coc students that are going to be reading this water technologies textbook it makes it personal and it helps it just click a little better another thing i do want to touch on although maybe it's not the first thing that comes to mind with ease of use is another thing that we do here at college of the canyons is we have to make all of our textbooks accessible in terms of 508 compliance so screen readers are visually impaired so that they can like have a comprehensive textbook experience as well so for us ease of use even translates to 508 compliance we spend a lot of time on the alt text we try to make it interesting we try to make it comprehensive we don't just want it to be a thing that we add at the end we want it to be something that we really think out we want to choose our images thoughtfully and then we want to thoughtfully alt text them so that the visually impaired can also have a textbook experience that's comprehensive and feels inclusive and complete great which kind of feeds into the last thing i want to talk about which is uh i think the third criteria for a good textbook style and design um i think that sometimes another issue that i would run into when promoting oer on campus is students would equate a free textbook with perhaps maybe a cheap textbook so i think that this is something really important to highlight is that when you bring students in to help professors are the content creators they're the people that are they're writing the content they're vetting the sources they're doing like the real work of the textbook but the student assistants they come in and they can really help tie it together in terms of style and design they can make it aesthetic they can really spend a lot of time on that alt text and make sure that everyone has a really like enriched textbook experience and that's something that the professor doesn't always have time to do to color code and to pick a color scheme and to try to make this all match and feel homey in a sense um and that's what we try to do here at college of the kings we try to help the professor create a continuity in the textbook because we're some of these sources are the professor's writing sources we're getting sources on the web and then we have to somehow bring all of that together into something that feels whole and complete and not like a just a bunch of random sources kind of loosely sewn together and i think the students appreciate it i think that they recognize it when they pick up a book and it's color coded and there's thoughtful alt text and it all feels like it belongs in the same place and that's why i want to emphasize that as well and that's a very brief overview i think of why student collaboration is so important in the world of oer so yeah oer is great on its own oer creation content creation is always fantastic i think when you add student collaboration it just you get this extra special level and you get a textbook that is lasting that sticks you get a textbook that's content rich but also student base student students are in mind when this textbook is created and i think that the students that use these textbooks they feel that at the end of the day they recognize that they see it and they appreciate it so this is brian weston i get to chime in i have such a wonderful job i have the pleasure of working with these wonderful student workers in here and i just kind of wanted to touch briefly on how we kind of assembled that team where you can possibly find those people to make a team of your own if you're interested and then just that bottom bullet is what i think is a huge benefit that comes of having actual students working on the textbook so currently right now we actually have three oer staff members and i think it was kind of covered before but they run the gambit of helping faculty with sentence level editing in the oer book finding images for the book as you can see even creating images and media for them to use in the book as well as formatting the oer textbook which is a huge selling point that or a huge service selling point that we're able to offer our faculty a lot of our faculty are very interested in oer you know sometimes we get caught up in how to search for materials and that's where we can kind of come in and say hey we have a team that can actually help you through the process find those images and really we can utilize faculty as the content expert for all of their knowledge that's what we really want from faculty is to know what should be taught what concepts we need to cover and we can kind of dress it up and style it to make sure the students are receptive to that oer book as well so where do you look we have a wonderful associated student government that has a lot of students in there that are always looking to help out people in there so we always try to reach and engage our ASG department what i didn't picture here is our learning center if you happen to have a tutoring center on your campus i've worked out a really good relationship we've happened to have borrowed quite a few of their tutors in there but i think the advantage of having one of the tutor student workers that used to work there come work now for oer is they've worked with students excuse me on their different textbooks on their assignments so they have a pretty nice grasp and understanding of what students are expected to know expected to learn as well as the other side of what the faculty are expecting so they kind of have the content i want to say their content experts but they at least have content familiarity in those subjects and what we try and do is pick different people so we currently have Trudy is wonderful in i think history i think she has some english she has some religion knowledge so we have quite a bit of a resource with Trudy as well as her media skills and we have another worker Mitchell who is very much science-based and he's able to kind of pick up those concepts that go right over my head and we also have another worker Alexa who is very skilled in english and that's the sentence level editing that i think a lot of people appreciate the reason i say you can also reach out if anyone out there is having maybe some i'll say challenges of working with the department and maybe adopting oer a really kind of nice strategy is to work with that department and ask them if they have any students that have really excelled that would possibly be interested in helping develop oer for the college once you do that hopefully you have a little inside nudge to say hey you know we have this wonderful worker they'd love to help find resources for that department so it's kind of a nice way to really respect that department work with them to really develop something for the betterment of everywhere else and then that last point i just wanted to say is a student focus group we don't have time to really you know go out for the oer and say you know what exactly do you think about this book you know what would you modify but when you happen to have student workers who have seen those text books i feel like we have a kind of built-in student focus group where we can you know pull their ideas get their feedback in a quick manner instead of you know hosting a full focus group but it gives us a kind of good glimpse of is this going to be effective or you know kind of what are our thoughts on this and how can we proceed from here and that goes right along and i didn't list it but a social justice issue some of us when we're writing text books you know we have certain frame of mind and not that we do it intentionally but we can you know leave out other perspectives and so our student oer staff has been wonderful and very in a very diplomatic way has worked with faculty to say hey you know instead of just saying this name here have you thought about using another name that might be more or more reflective of our student population and i think that's really helped holster oer really helps engage our students in oer and i would say if you have the chance to have student workers on your oer team i highly highly encourage it it's a wonderful experience for our students it's a wonderful i guess different perspective for faculty to kind of see what students are expecting and i think it's a something i'd highly recommend if you have a chance to intercorporate that in there and i'll turn it back over to una i think at this point great thank you so much trudy and brian uh for sharing that what an inspiration um in the words there was a question uh that i saw um i think it was from lori actually lori our previous speaker and she was asking can you tell her a little bit about the tools that are used to develop the um that are used to develop the books and the materials um sure okay yeah so i'm not sure the tools it's not like maybe what programs we use to help write our books or yeah um we're still actually so we're looking into uh press books i think a lot of people are switching over to press books we are still currently in a word and so we develop a lot of our things into word and then we switch it over into pdf and check for accessibility after that so uh the reason we did that is we'll have the word document we can send to our dsps department in case they need to print it do whatever they need to modify and make it accessible and but we are looking into press books at the moment so but currently we're still in word and pdf to develop oh we are great great thank you for sharing that that's i think that's really helpful i think many faculty are comfortable with word so um that's a good place to start them for sure um let's see if there's any other questions here um pola says she likes the highlight from trudy pola also is at college of the canyons um i like the highlight from trudy that students need to understand the concept of oer in order to understand why they're low-cast and or free yeah i i really think it's um um working on a project like this can really bring that home to students and there was a question here from naphin um brian you might want to answer that one are the students work study students or are they post graduate staff yeah it depends so i've actually uh the three people i've named um have come in some have come in as students actually locally at coc eventually kind of came to the tutoring center and came over here um but we've had some other um students come in um it yeah it just depends well we'll welcome everyone we try to get student workers first and then typically they turn into short-term employees um because i think they like working in our department they they get the skill set to keep continuing from there so yeah it kind of depends but yeah we'll welcome anyone with a student perspective wonderful all right oh no dear sorry about that um hmm just one second here while we get to the appropriate place we are next going to hear from um Megan Dempsey and uh at raritan um valley community college in new jersey uh nican great thank you um so rvcc is really in its fledgling stages when it comes to oer but we've made a lot of progress in this past year um and once we started expressing interest and i started talking to my provost about it she supported myself and three faculty members to go to the open ed conference in anaheim in october which was an amazing experience and we while we were there started talking about what the missing pieces are for our oer initiative because we had a faculty member who was trying to get some things off the ground for a couple of years um and i know you can just advance if you're able to thank you um so somebody had been trying to make some progress on oer on campus and just it was just not catching hold so we started talking about why that was and there's a few different reasons but after seeing the presentations at the conference and hearing from students we realized that for us a major missing piece were the student voices so we actually started emailing with the director of student life right from the conference and he told us that different iterations of sga and i think i have a photo of the most recent sga group in there they had talked about oer and and they recognized textbook costs as being a huge issue for students and i'm sorry that that instagram photo did not translate properly here um but they also felt they were not able to make any traction and thought they were getting resistance from faculty and faculty just weren't interested in it so when we came back to campus and started talking to the current sga leaders some more we realized that the campus i think was primed to try this again we had a core group of faculty who were really interested we had a student government group of leaders who wanted to see progress made and saw the impact that textbook costs were having on their peers and really wanted to make a difference so we started having some conversations around how that could happen and another benefit that came out of the conference um you can go ahead to the next slide was i met katelyn vitas i hope i'm saying that correctly from us perg and she and i just started talking about ways that we could motivate students ideas that they uh things like the textbook graveyard and some of the ideas that were presented earlier she started sharing with me and we realized that katelyn actually grew up a couple of miles away from rbcc and she was heavily involved in butger's um initiative to get some affordable textbook programs going and although she lives in dc now she was coming to new jersey for Thanksgiving so that worked out perfectly and she volunteered to come to campus she is fantastic and she volunteered to come to campus and meet with our students so she actually came to campus twice and met with our student government leaders and what was really beneficial in that meeting was that they could really relate well to katelyn and she was able to give our students talking points for getting oer conversation started with faculty she gave them quick data points that they could throw into conversations and most importantly i think she gave them the confidence to actually go out and start these conversations which i think they were lacking and the rest of us just hadn't really been able to to provide for them so she gave them a wealth of knowledge in like 30 minutes and basically said to them okay stand up i've got some petitions here we're going to go knock on faculty doors and get them to sign them and i think our students were a little taken aback and we're quite sure what to do with that at the moment but they did it and that first day she came they walked around campus for an hour and got six faculty signatures and just started talking to faculty members so again this just boosted their confidence tremendously and i think got them very excited about the fact that there were key faculty members out there who were interested in doing this so if you want to go ahead to the next slide i have some more ideas that we got put in place in addition to starting to talk to faculty and i think they've continued that petitioning through the semester in the beginning of the spring semester they did the textbook hashtag textbook broke campaign on social media similar to what alamo presented and they stood outside of the bookstore on the first couple days of classes and had students write down how much they spent on textbooks and posted their pictures on social media and i think it was really fun for them and it raised awareness among other students and that was a great idea our current sga president is also a very strong advocate very outspoken person which is great to have and he's you know got an audience with the president and the provost so every opportunity he gets he's talking to them about how the students want the administration to really support faculty momentum around this and i think hearing it at the administrative level from the students has been huge we have a lot of administrative support to begin with but that's certainly added to our ability to get things done the sga passed a resolution which i'll share in just a minute supporting open educational resources and they've also been pushing to get a list of courses that are zero cost available to students right now unfortunately there's only three official courses on that list but because there was nowhere for it to really live i volunteered to put it on the library's open education page so i just started it there and i'm sharing it but they really want to start having conversations with students and saying hey why don't you try this course and see what you think and they're also asking for designations in banner and i love that idea of making it an attribution that can be a filter so i'm hoping to go to my banner people and see if they can make that happen but they want to make sure that students are aware this is an option for them and so the students are really pushing the administrative side to make those things happen which i think is very positive and the next slide i just have an example of the resolution they passed i think they got a template from kaitlyn or from one of the student purg sites and you know so they've got their very formal official language and some data in there and definitions and then if you advance one more their actual resolution to not only support educational resources but encourage the administration to support faculty in their movement towards this and with that support with the student advocacy we were able to our foundation was able to get us a donor to grant some funding to support stipends for faculty so we're starting small but we have come a tremendous way in 10 months and i don't think we could have made as much progress or really gotten the donation we got without being able to say our students are strongly in support of this wow but make it okay thank you i had no idea about the background that is amazing and shows how far you can come in a short period of time with the right resources and the right folks involved let's see you've got a couple of questions that are coming out here okay yes richard hershman made a comment which you can take a look at thank you the citation from the college board and on costs yeah great wow um so um thank you so much megan for uh sharing that with us and i just want to go through just a couple of slides here and then we're going to open this up to all our speakers and all of our participants i should say to um ask questions so we're uh we do keep a list on our website of all of these webinars by the way and their recordings it usually takes about 48 hours till we get get it posted because we do caption them um we also keep a list of conferences that are coming up national primarily national some regional and that focus on open education and we have submission dates and so forth so it's can be quite useful if you're planning your year ahead and of course we hope that many of you can come to niagra falls in october to the open ed 2018 conference if you're not on our email list you can apply to be on it by going to our website under community email there's a button you can click that says join and it'll take you through that uh thank you kerry yes kerry posted our open education conference link there in the chat window she maintains that kerry is uh our vice president of the website um and in june we're going to have a webinar on open platforms um really uh also examining the care framework which is the stewardship oer framework that came out this last spring and we will have nicole finkbeiner from open stacks talking about how they work with vendors and what criteria they use i think many of you know nicole and quill west our president of cccoer will be our facilitator for that one and we hope you can join us for that and uh now i i once again want to say thank you so much to uh our student uh former student now oer assistant uh trudy radke and brian weston from college of the canyons and thank you to lori colman and philip inaya from alamo colleges who shared uh their amazing work and how they're creating awareness for students around oer and low cost and finally megan demsey at raritan valley so we are open for questions or if um my if any of our speakers would like to make some comments um as well any closing remarks uh we are open for that as well i'll just add something really quick this is brian weston from college of the canyons uh i didn't quite touch on it but the student workers or student helpers that you have are really also great at helping promote uh they tend to know what students are using at the college for social media uh hint it's not yahoo groups it's not aol typically it's you know there's a few other platforms but it's just really nice to get that perspective and be like how can i engage or you know what kind of graphic would best uh you know be representative to really attract those students so just kind of wanted to throw that out there as well thank you for sharing that brian i think that's uh very very useful um that most faculty are probably not using some are but many are not using the same social media platforms and i just wanted to make a correction page this question about is alamo open just for oer does it encompass other free and low cost materials and i think i said that it does but actually uh for alamo open it's not low cost but it's free or no cost so open or no cost i just wanted to make that correction as well thank you lori and i can just respond to a question from pola in the chat how did katelyn reach the students where were they gathered so this was a meeting of our student government association leaders there was about maybe 10 of them or so it was their regular weekly meeting that they had and katelyn was kind enough to fit that into her schedule and come and meet with them on two separate occasions wonderful thank you meghan and rich had a comment here and i'm not sure exactly who he directed it at but he said have you looked at working with the college bookstore student advisory committee if your campus has one and its student workers it sounds like a very interesting idea we haven't done that just speaking from alamo colleges know we hadn't thought of that but i think that yeah i would agree that that would be an excellent opportunity to capture some of those students who are kind of in the front lines of you know those those who come to the bookstore and searching high and low to get the best deals so yeah i think that's a great idea great thank you bori and i i agree with rich's suggestion there i know in the past it sometimes the bookstore may not know why there isn't a textbook ordered for a class and i'm not saying that's happening at any of these colleges because you probably started to work those processes out but sometimes the the bookstore hasn't known in the past and that leaves a point of confusion so making sure that they're included in the communications path that there is an oer textbook that may be available free online but there there might be a print copy through the bookstore or through some other mechanism any final comments trudy that you'd like to share um honestly uh well i'd like to thank unna for i think putting this on and the community college consortium for open education i'm happy to be a part of it and yeah i just i think we i think everyone had a lot of great things to say and i just like to emphasize one more time that uh i guarantee that on any community college any college campus there are really bright students that just want a chance to to help out to further their education to further their skills to put something on the resume and just genuinely help other students i know that there's a lot here i've met with them i've talked to them they're brilliant they're willing um so if you if you go out and look you're definitely going to find them i think that's what i'd like to say great thank you trudy for that um that pitch i think that's a really important point that students find the students they're there you just have to provide the opportunity and i will i and thank you for thanking me for putting this on you know i have an advisory committee that helps us plan our webinar topics throughout the year um and a number of those folks are on here today particularly regina gong who was our professional development vp this year she's actually hosting a oer summit at her college today so i don't believe she's online but she helped us with planning these topics and we do try to include students but i have to say trudy we were really lucky to have you today um we we try to include students in the topics we don't often get a student so this is really special so thank you yeah trudy was being a little modest i just posted a link to a site book she just recently finished as well so you guys can kind of see how it's still in works but how the formatting and how the separation of concepts and ideas is starting to pan out and what that kind of looks like it looks like a really nice book and it's really a great treat to see that as a student because sometimes you do run across oer and it could be the most brilliant well written oer but if it's just you know 400 pages of text you're going to turn some students away from that so i think just adding that again that stylistic component to really bring out those concepts is wonderful so i just wanted to thank trudy again she's amazing yeah and i wanted to ask something thank you i agree trudy trudy is amazing for you and ryan maybe as well um in my college i remember when we had a focus group conversation with some of the chairs one of the chairs of the biology department mentioned that the reason they don't adopt some oer text is because of the layout and in fact they said you know we like that the publisher provides provides the students ebooks and of course print books but the ebooks are designed in ways that they they mimic a print book and so that students can modify the viewing of the ebooks so that they can see pages that are meant to be side by side side by side on the page but they find that some of the oer versions of their course content don't offer that kind of viewing for students and it's just more frustrating for students that they can't see what they need to see simultaneously on two different pages have have you run into any of that or have you experienced any of that in terms of feedback maybe from students or faculty i have actually and that is a really great point to bring up and i think that um i think that that's been a a complaint or at least an issue people have had of oer in the past for a while is you know can even with all the attention paid to it can it can it really mimic a textbook can it be on a textbook level will it look like something that a publisher produced i definitely think that um you can run into those issues and i do think that creating um aesthetically pleasing or publish esk type of oer textbooks it does create an opportunity to think outside the box but i would also um i would also say that in the past couple of years even a lot of new tech has been developed and people now that this is kind of the ball starting to roll and people are starting to get into this i think that it's getting easier and easier almost every day to create textbooks that really are on publisher standards i mean we're still i would say that we're still a bit of a ways off but we're very close we're much closer i think than we've ever been and if you just dig a little they're really there's a lot of free resources that you really can use um to create these textbooks that that really make them appealing and then i like i was saying in the aesthetics um or style portion the student doesn't feel cheated out of aesthetics or um functionality i think which is kind of what you were getting at there there are ways to recreate that like a publisher would it just takes maybe a little extra time and maybe i would say some extra tech knowledge so if you have a student maybe that has tech knowledge or a faculty member or something that definitely will help because it is a little techy but it can be done and i'll just add to that again the beauty of OER is you know we're we're constantly updating and revising and you know when we get feedback from faculty and their students um they're actually bringing some of their textbooks back we're modifying it and trying to really again work off the comments and appreciate the loveliness of OER and the fact that we can update it you know in a quick manner and give it back to them for you know improvements and everything from there so i think it's just OER is a wonderful tool to you know if you don't like it let's make it even better you know let's find that student to really you know bring that technology and upgrade it from there so i i think it's just a wonderful opportunity to revisit OER absolutely i agree thank you both and we we just had a question from Mary Orem who's from Tri-County Technical College in in South Carolina and she was asking about the ability to highlight and make notes in the text of OER and thank you Nathan Smith from Houston Community College who mentioned that this is something that the pdf reader can provide to a student so if the textbook is in pdf and they're using a reader that has that capability they can do the highlighting and sounds like we should do a webinar on that in the you know in the near future as well and just to add to that i think students who are pretty savvy in kind of like the digital highlighting and note-taking they tend to have a particular in my experience i'm sorry that's my phone they have a a particular tool or platform that they like to use for that so the more variety of formats in OER is it available in i think that sort of addresses that need in a way that a publisher e-book cannot where they're probably much more limited in what what tools are available to them and what platform they can use it on all right thank you Megan for that as well and i think at this point we're going to stop the recorder and close the webinar and once again thanks so much to our speakers today this was a really rich learning experience for so many of us and thank you so much