Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey everybody, welcome to Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott Agataya, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, Mr. Evan Kristal, top B2B social media influencer. Hey, Hev. Hey, good to see you. And today on Data Movers, we'll sit down with yet another influential person in today's leading data center and telecom world, supporting the requirements of this new normal. Speaking of new normal, Jamie, have you gotten your vaccination yet? You know it. I just got back yesterday from getting the first shot in my arm. Bizer. Oh, did you get the Chinese or the Russian one? Or which... Bizer. And out here in California, they have it down to a science. I actually, it was a drive-through. I didn't even have to get out of my car. We just drove up. They popped into my arm. Had to like sit in a line. And by the time I was through the line, it was at 15 minutes to check that I'm all right. And then back out on my way. It's amazing. Amazing. Did you get fries or like a Coke to go with that or? No, but they had advertising of like amazing, like very, very like food that you just want like fries and shakes and stuff. Along the route, I thought that is just so mean. Like they're giving me these. That is the American way of vaccine and a shake. That is living the dream. Yeah, so I've had my second Moderna because everyone knows, you know, Moderna is the best. But in all seriousness now, I guess for those of us who pay attention to CDC guidance like us, we're allowed to travel now after we've been vaccinated two weeks after. So we're gonna hit the road. Are you getting close to getting on a plane? Well, you know what? I'm really thrilled because come June, my mom and my aunt would be the very first relatives that come out and get to see my baby girl who's now about a half months. And she still hasn't been held by like any family members other than or dad and me. So we're really excited to have her grandma out here to give her that much needed love other than her face times, which are awesome. But still like, I find Eva now is at the age where she's like looking behind the phone, like, is this it? Great. That's gonna be awesome. You gotta live stream that reunion. That's gonna be great. But speaking of reunions, we have a reunion with an amazing guest and client of yours. Let's get on to our show. Yes, yes, yes. You guys know it here at Data Movers. We just dive into the background stories of our guests, their career highs and lows, unique perspectives. And today we are so honored to welcome Mr. Dennis Savage, Vice President of Operations at Infinite. Hey Dennis, how are you? Oh, I'm great. Thanks for having me. Hey Dennis, good to see you. Nice meeting you for the first time. So Dennis, you're in San Diego, I believe. What is it like down in paradise? It's as beautiful as you might imagine. You know, I actually just came back from a trip to Florida and the dichotomy between the two cities in areas is astounding because we're very heavy mask centric. There, you're not sure if COVID was a real thing or not. So... Well, I'll take San Diego any day of the week. But looking at your IT career here, at the young age, you describe yourself as a slayer of dragons, which sounds like kind of a video game or, I don't know, maybe it's HBO game of Thrones or something else. I've become a video game fanatic during the pandemic again after a hate us of like 30 years. So tell us, for us gamers, gamer wannabes or parents who are afraid of their kids playing video games all the time, how did gaming spur your interest in the tech career? You know, it's interesting and I will admit that I started out playing Dungeons & Dragons before computers were really a thing. Oh, you're old. Yes, we had a standing game on Friday night amongst my friends and there's still some of my closest friends today. But my first computer was in Apple II and it had one of the best games ever and I still would play it if I had it available to me, which is the original Ultima game and that was a Dungeons & Dragons based game. And, you know, the original game got me really hooked on computers and figuring out how to build them. We moved on from there to a Commodore 64 to play tech mobile and used to have tournaments, you know, and kind of crown our champion for the day. And as games continued to improve, as graphics continued to improve, so did the desire to have a better computer, a specific component that could seamlessly run the new games that were being made available to us. And as a kid, when you build a computer from scratch, there's almost no greater accomplishment. So as I got older, that memory sort of stuck with me. It took me a little while to get there, admittedly. I actually went to school, my original intent, was pre-law, and I took the LSATs, passed the LSATs, was gonna go to law school and decided that I hated everything to do with it. So I started over and went into computer science because I harken back to the time where I love to play and I love to kind of figure things out. And this seemed like the perfect transition into that realm. We may need to throw away the script here, Jamie, because I just want to talk gaming and Dungeons and Dragons for the next hour, which will really annoy Jamie to no end. But let me ask you before we go back to script here, what was your favorite Dungeons and Dragons character? Because you kind of look like a level 10 wizard, but I don't know, maybe, am I wrong?  So I had to cut this. Get new beginnings, kind of thinking, going, hey, the pandemic, we're reaching the new world order, it's time for me to change as well. All right, well, you're back to a level two wizard. So Jamie, why don't you get us back on script here? This is really going off the rails. No, no, I mean, I love it. And it's so amazing too. You took the LSAT, you instead of came to an awakening that you wanna figure things out. So you came back to our world, our neck of the woods. And boy, you had a phenomenal career here before coming, of course, to Infinite. You worked for Xeo, where you were in charge of all the network infrastructure for data centers across the U.S. and Europe, not a tiny job, a lot of responsibilities. But what was something surprising you learned through that experience? You know, what's interesting is when you go into a bigger company like that and they had over 3,000 employees, you would think going in that the documentation was really, it was there, it was set up so you could achieve everything you needed to. So while the company was impressive with their change control policies and procedures, the lack of documentation was a detriment. So what that meant for someone like me is taking the extra time to prepare when we were doing an upgrade since only a subsection of what I needed, the information was readily available. So to make the changes that we were making, we had to formalize some of those processes to ensure the decisions that we were making were thorough. So it's almost we had to build things on the fly. As an example, I was someone who was responsible for pitching to some of the larger companies. So we would get a large company who wanted to go into a data center that I've never been to. So I will add that fact, but I have to figure out all of the components that are in that data center, including in some of these big clients who are looking for their own fiber strands coming in from the street. So as the example, I would go and have to talk to a lot of different people to get pieces of information that I could kind of fit into this puzzle in order to make a Visio documents so I could present to a client, hey, here's why it looks, here are our fiber carriers who are doing diverse entry and even inside the building, here are the meet me rooms. Here's what the meet me rooms look like. Here's where a particular provider comes in. He's also over here on this other side and the other meet me room. So you can have two diverse paths into your particular space. But it was really kind of that piece of information together was going to different geographic people who knew but didn't centralize that documentation. So I would say from a surprising aspect, that was definitely one. So you came up through the network engineering side of the house, obviously, to run network engineering. What are some of the experiences, best practices or learnings that you brought with you into your current role that maybe you could share with the listeners? I mean, everything starts and ends really with security. So if we come with a security framework in mind and we have the idea that this is going to be prevalent in everything we do, then that can filter down to the rest of the organization. If we come and that isn't the main component of what we're trying to achieve, then that gets sort of pushed to the side and the stakeholders within the company don't understand its importance. So really the first thing I would tell anybody in IT is come with a security focus. It doesn't matter if you're a network, it doesn't matter if you're in systems, it should be the same because then we're bringing that strategy always forward with us and not having to sell somebody on it. And that's a good transition to my next question. Security being so critical, is that one of the things you look for when you go to hire IT talent? What type of backgrounds you're looking for, teaching, training, skills? So I would tell you that I am a little bit different than most people as a hiring manager. When possible, I am not a fan of looking at resumes. It changes when I'm the initial screener for a job, but if I'm not the initial screener and somebody else has looked at a resume, I don't wanna see it because I believe that gives me a preconceived notion about the person and I'm already making a judgment without talking to them.  They're the person who owns that story that they can share in the way only they can share. And I'm gonna learn a lot more about them going that route. But from a skills perspective, I'm looking for someone who has an eagerness and a willingness to learn. Essentially, I would call that an energy that's kind of apparent, sitting on the edge of their seat, their engagement level because in this particular industry, understanding that I may not know the next technology to come out. We're gonna have to figure it out. We're gonna have to learn that technology. So having that as that primary thing and again, energy is so important to me will tell me a lot more about a person than if they're a little bit more stoic and they keep things to themselves. The second piece of that would be communication. Communication is in everything we do and talking to customers and talking to our internal teams, making sure that they have the awareness of how to communicate effectively and speak intelligently about something and in layman's terms. So if you can take a concept of IT that's a little bit more challenging and break it down into smaller steps that anybody can get, that will be key for me in the hiring process. Best answer I've ever given. Greater advice. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if I actually ever need to hire someone I think I'll take some of that on board. So you've gone from a big distributed global multinational data center company to boutique specialist IT solutions company. How would you compare and contrast those experiences? Do you have a preference for either of those experiences? And what did you learn along the way? So I'll tackle the preference first. I would say the answer is yes, that I do have a preference to be on this a little bit of a smaller side. You really get to know the people you're working with. On a day-to-day basis, you're constantly interacting with them. When you have a company that's 3,000 maybe I met 200 of those through all of my interactions but you don't get the same kind of feel of home-ness I guess would be that word I'm looking for. So definitely prefer a smaller. I understand the bigger and I can play in that realm too but definitely prefer the smaller. As to the second question, kind of what did I learn and the differences and similarities? I think the key differentiator is the notion that in a bigger company people should be more siloed. So you're focused on your area and your area only when you're in a bigger company. There's good and bad to this. The good is you're developing your skill set as a true subject matter expert in that particular discipline. The bad is you don't necessarily have the full context of how to help someone. In the more specialized IT solution space there is a need to know how things interact with each other. This is sort of an essential component to business in understanding your customers. So what happens if I need to let's say patch a machine which requires a reboot? How does that impact the machine that's sitting next to it? Perhaps I'm about to reboot a web server that relies on a database connection and another server. So now I'm potentially breaking two and I have to be cognizant of that to ensure that that comes back as well. So it's the breadth and scope that we have from a smaller, I guess kind of, you said specialized boutique allows us not to sacrifice what is best for the client. If we look at the other side we do have to sacrifice a little bit of that knowledge because we're focused on the single discipline. And I may not know how that interacts with something. So we take it back then more maybe on the specialized IT side I lose a little bit of the in depth knowledge by being more of a generalist but I also understand that customer's environment better. I understand the point of view they have and we don't have to make a decision within a silo that could have a greater impact on the customer's environment without that fore knowledge. So we've been able to combat that a little bit by having some specific SMEs that, you know they would be the leads of a particular place but they still need to know what's going on with the rest of the business. And I'll give you just kind of another example to really highlight this. If I'm upgrading a firewall, we as a network person and if that was only thing I knew and did then my only focus is as soon as I bring that firewall back online because I patched it to the latest and greatest iOS or code, I'm done. In our case, we need to know what lies behind the firewall so we can perform tests. We can make our own checks and balances that say, yes I upgraded the firewall also all the rule sets that are making the web server accessible to the internet still work too. We didn't break something else along the way. So that in that smaller setting gives me perspective that I don't think I necessarily had in some of the bigger world. Well, I'm calling you after the show I'm having some issues with my Comcast router. So I really need some deep expertise, but. I'm not sure if you can afford level 10 wizard retail. Hey, I was downgraded. I own only level two. So, you know, I heard that too. I was like, wow, just cutting the beard. That's harsh. Talking gaming and getting back to the personal by the way, so well said, you know someone who's lived in both small and large companies and obviously being an entrepreneur and running our own business here at JSA. It's like, yes, yes, yes, you know we need that flexibility, that insight. If you're salad off, you still need that, that general awareness. I was getting very excited listening to your response. Thank you, I appreciate that. Now getting over to the personal.  So tell me, are there like tons of sports analogies flying around your virtual office? What are some lessons you learned through sports that really help you apply to the IT business world? So that's funny, because I don't generally use any sports analogies at all. And, you know, when you're in the IT space for long enough and especially in San Diego, you recognize that not everybody has that level of sports that you do. And I have five kids. Not a single one of them is a sports fan.  And to throw those analogies out, it just, it doesn't play well in the tech space generally. Because, you know, some of the language out there about us geeks and nerds is probably true. You know, so we have to keep that in context. I think from the lessons learned, however, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned through sports that you can take advantage of. And probably the first thing, the one thing everybody learns through sports is that there is a support system. So no one is in a loan because you have a team that's supporting you. And I played hockey at the minor league level. So I was actually pretty good. And one of the things in not knowing whether you know hockey or not, you can't as a single individual go through an entire defense in hockey. You can every once in a while, and it's just like life. Every once in a while, you can do something alone and you're gonna succeed. But most of the time we need other people who can help us. Having the right people in that right spot, right person, right time, we've all heard that saying. So hey, I don't know, that's not a sports analogy, we'll use it as an analogy.  It's gonna give you tricks you didn't know yesterday, just like we can pass along the knowledge we have of playing this game, this game of life now, we can pass along the things we've learned and help someone else grow. So really it's that team concept, it's the support system that we're looking for. Because again, we can't do it alone. We need other people. That answer really knocked it out of the park. That answer was a total one. Oh, and then. That's great. Hey, was that because Jamie used to do this alone and she's thinking. Well, it might go back to that. So, you know, we gotta be careful. Any more of those cracks, yeah. But actually, I'm pretty famous here inside JSA is trying so hard to make a sports analogy work, but being so poor in my sports knowledge that people are like, you know, hockey is on IceJay, not a field. And I go, stop, stop. And I go, right. Luckily, I don't interview a lot of sports celebs. Phew. But anyway, that brings us to our rapid fire section. Evan, you wanna take it away? Yeah, so tell us. You came up through network engineering lots of long nights and I bet you even had a pager at one point. So you are, are you an early bird or a night owl as working work goes?  Oh, yeah. What world do you live in that you have traffic? Come on, this is the one bonus of the pandemic. You don't have traffic in it. That's perfectly true, Evan. And of course, as we're all in COVID craziness, we're all at home Netflixing. What's your last great movie you watched? See, now you're making me miss the midnight screenings that we used to go to, all the great things about getting out into the world. You know, honestly, the last great one, I would probably say is Avengers Endgame for me, which it was 2019 now. That was two years ago. And again, we went to the midnight screening, yep, spoken like a true geek and nerd, Avengers Endgame. I thought you were gonna say Lord of the Rings, but that's okay, we'll go with another one. So what was your first car? You know, as a kid, teenager, college student, whatever, what was your first drive? All right, so I know this is rapid fire, but I have to explain. My first car was the Blue Beru. It was a blue Subaru.  I mean, it had dents everywhere. So I bought a rubber mallet. And before high school games, everybody used to come with the rubber mallet, with the role was you can't hit the tires, you can't hit the windows. Don't hit anything that I need to run the car. But they would take the rubber mallet and actually smash the car with the rubber mallet.  And yet again, showing your sports fanatic side of you. It was the Blue Beru, it was the symbol of pride and joy. It's amazing that car moved at all. And it revved up the fans before the big games. That's right. I'm talking sports, but what would you compete in if you were in the Olympics, hockey? Absolutely hockey. Yes, got one. Got one. Great. So we're all cooking at home, a lot of us, or at least eating at home. What's the best meal you know how to cook personally? Beef Wellington. Wow, it's fancy. It also happens to be my favorite thing to eat. So I had to learn. I took Gordon Ramsay's recipe and I think I've perfected it. I'm pretty good at it. See, I usually get them pre-made and just pop them in the oven and pretend like, wow, I've done so much of that in my case. So much work. No, I mean, I got the whole thing. I make my own duck cell. I do perjudo raft. Finding perjudos is one of the hardest things, funnily enough. Yeah, it's aged, cut thin. Yep. Oh yeah. Perfect. And what is the coolest city you've ever traveled to? Santorini, Greece, without a question. As you go up towards Santorini, especially if you're taking a boat in, it's like the old Princess Bride movie where behind you are the cliffs and insanity. So it's amazing. It's absolutely and they have the best food too. For you fried cheese, you have me. I mean, you have me. My husband is definitely our honeymoon. If I totally, totally recommend. So now I have the travel bug and I'm hungry and I don't know like, but thank you. Thank you for joining us. Really interesting, you know, bio and I learned a lot about hiring and the data center world from an insider perspective. So, yeah, I look forward to meeting you in person someday soon. Likewise, Evan, I appreciate it. Yeah. And what a lovely trip down memory lane on all those early gaming consoles as well. I loved it. All right guys, if you enjoyed Data Movers podcast today and I'm sure you have, I certainly enjoyed it. Be sure to check out jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming Data Movers episodes releasing every other week on Wednesday mornings, as well as other JSA podcast series that you can pick up there. And be sure to follow us on Twitter at Jay Scotto and Evan Kirstel and check out my new personal cryptocurrency, dollar B2B on rally. So, look forward. Twitter grouper or something. What's the purple dot again? Everyone's talking about it. Twitter Spaces, so yeah, catch you on Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, the whole nine yards. Nice seeing you. Thank you so much, Evan. Thank you again, Dennis and everybody out there. Stay safe and of course, be networking.


Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second webinar of the fall 2014 series. This is from the community college conference at the open ed education conference. Today's topic is on open course and design and development. As many of you recall, last month we talked about development and curation of open textbooks. And so today we're taking that a little further with the development of OER based courses. And we have the pleasure of having three experts in this area. One from Northern Virginia Community College, a member of our community college consortium. Also the University of Maryland University College, who is also an institutional member of the open education consortium. And finally, our colleagues from Lumen Learning who are doing some very exciting things in open course development as well. Before we get started, I just want to point out just a couple of features of the Blackboard Collaborate system, which we are very pleased to use and that the California Community College system allows us to use. On the left-hand side, you will see a participant's window. And hopefully you'll see yourself in there. And let me see. And 44 other attendees. And I'm sure we'll have a few more join us before we get started here. Most of the questions, certainly the verbal questions, we're going to keep till the end of the presentation, simply because we have so much great information to give you this morning. But I do use that chat window, which is immediately below the participant's window, to provide comments and questions as we go along. And we'll come back to those at the end if we can't answer them during the presentations. Now, I'd like to ask you to let us know where you're from. You can pick up one of the little items here in the toolbar. The second icon down at the star, you can pick up items of interest and drag that over here to show us where you're from. You're from North America, South America. And if that doesn't work for you, just type in your contact information or your institution in the chat window and let us know where you're from. It looks like, oh, my goodness. So we've got some folks from all around North America. It looks like we even have some folks from South America. So very exciting. Big audience today. And a really interesting topic. I think everyone's going to really get a lot out of this. So thanks for sharing that. And this morning, our order of the agenda is after we're going to have some questions here in just a moment. And then they tell you just a little bit about the community college consortium for OER, which is an associate consortium of the open education consortium. For those of you who might be joining us for the first time. And then we're going to go straight to our presentations. And finally, we'll have time for questions at the end. So at this point, I'm going to ask our audience to introduce themselves in the chat window. So thank you for that. And then I'm going to give each of our speakers a moment here to say hello and tell us a little bit about their day job. And so we're going to start with Karen Binyari, the vice provost at University of Maryland University College. Karen? Thank you. And welcome everybody. We're really glad to be here. We're glad you're also interested in this topic. At UMUC, I am the vice provost for the Center for Innovation and Learning and Student Success. We are very interested as one of the largest public online universities at really scaling up our innovations and improving processes. And we think OER is something that we can do that also while benefiting our students also increases design. And we're looking forward to talking to you. Thank you, Karen. We're really pleased to have you today. And next, I'd like to introduce Dr. Preston Davis, who's the director of Extended Learning at the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College. Preston? Yes, hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm very pleased to be able to talk a little bit about NOVA's program around open educational resources. And I'm also very pleased to be sharing this presentation today with UMUC and Lumen Learning as well. All right. Thanks very much, Preston. I'm very glad to have you today as well. And finally, we're very pleased to have Kim Fannis join us. Kim is the CEO and co-founder of Lumen Learning. And they've really been a leader in OER-based course development. So, Kim. Hi, I'm Kim Fannis from Lumen Learning. Lumen Learning is a company that David Wiley and I co-founded together. We are almost exactly two years old. Really, the driver behind Lumen Learning is focus on student success using OER and our belief that we really need a more diverse ecosystem so that institutions can make investments in OER and foundations and nonprofit organizations can as well. But there can also be some commercial solutions and commercial providers that work across institutions to enable sharing and success and progress. So, that's the role we seek to fill at Lumen Learning. All right. Thank you, Kim. Very happy to have you as well. So, I just want to tell you a little bit about the Community College Consortium. We are an associate consortium of the Open Education Consortium. And our mission is promoting adoption of open educational resources to enhance teaching and learning. We're all about expanding access to education for students by not only making college more affordable but providing high quality resources for independent learning as well. And this webinar series is part of our professional development outreach where we try to provide information to community colleges. And in fact, I know a number of you are from four-year colleges about trends and where the open education space is going. And so, this is a very important dialogue that we have had with students throughout the academic year. And finally, we focus on what's of interest to community colleges, our students and faculty. But of course, our students often become students at the four-year colleges and universities. And so, we also are very interested in what's happening in that space. So, before we get started, I just wanted to give you a very brief overview of what the idea was behind doing a webinar on OER-based course design and development. Of course, we know that there are a lot of people who are interested in doing that. So, I just wanted to give you a very brief overview of what the idea was behind doing a webinar on OER-based course design and development. Of course, we know that there can be many positive outcomes for students. Affordability is often the one that is mentioned in making courses OER-based. They're not requiring an extensive publisher textbook. There's often other benefits. So, as a course is redesigned, pedagogical improvements can be made with OER. Faculty have the freedom to choose from different materials to put together an OER-based course. And we've heard from faculty that this can be a very liberating experience. When they don't have an expensive publisher textbook assigned to their course, they often feel that they can provide a more organic experience. They don't feel like they have to cover everything in the textbook simply because it costs over $200. So, there's a lot of benefits here that aren't always apparent initially as these efforts are being launched. I know our speakers today are going to go into a lot more detail about this. They're going to talk about the pedagogy around their course design and development and some of the early outcomes that they're seeing for students. And finally, there's many institutional benefits and challenges around using OER-based course design and development. Obviously, affordability is a huge one. Challenges over the long run, though, are things that need to be considered in the planning so that this is a sustainable effort over time. And I'm going to let my speakers address those questions as they're quite capable of. And so, our first speaker is going to be Dr. Davis from NOVA. And I just want to say a few words about Preston because we've been working with him for a long time now. He's been a member for three-plus years. And they started their OER-based general education certificate two years ago, I believe. They launched it 12 a year ago. Of course, the planning and the development work was occurring before that. And this year, they're offering even more courses leading to an 1 1 0 degree. So, they've been, they've had these small steps moving towards this really successful outcome over the last few years. And I'd like to invite Preston to tell us more about that. Great. Thank you so much, Luna. So, at Northern Virginia Community College, we started about three years ago trying to figure out ways to increase student success and student access and reduce costs. And so, we started planning a two-phase project around building a series of OER-based courses. And we started by focusing on first year of an associate's degree leading to a general study certificate. And then this year, finishing up with full degree tracks that students could pursue, taking courses that use open educational resources and not requiring the purchase of textbooks. And so, this is a program that we have launched through our online campus, which is the Extended Learning Institute. We serve about 23,000 students online at NOVA. And we wanted to have a program that would allow every student the opportunity to take at least one or two OER courses, if not a full degree. And so, we took a broad approach to defining our project and what we wanted it to look like. And so, in terms of open educational resources, we really wanted to share with faculty what their options were and the variety of materials and resources that were available to help encourage them to sort of take the leap and move away from relying on the textbooks and publisher-insulated material that came along with that. And so, we looked at free open textbooks, videos, online tutorials, library collections, which include journals and other types of things to build a comprehensive approach to incorporating free and open content in our courses at NOVA. And so, the reason that we pursued this project was first to increase access. One of the things that we noticed that I noticed personally when teaching and many of my colleagues noticed as well is that quite often there are a number of students in a course that do not have the textbook. Most often it's because they can't afford to purchase all of their textbooks. And I recently was presenting to a group of faculty and I asked for a show of hands on how many faculty knew of students in their courses that did not purchase the textbook. And about three quarters of the room raised their hand. And then I asked the question, do you know how much students pay for the textbook that you use? And only about one quarter of the room raised their hand. So, there is a little bit of a disconnect and we wanted to make sure that we addressed that and provided the students taking these courses with access to all of the required materials that were needed from day one in the course. Of course, increasing affordability was a major concern as well. Textbooks can be very expensive and we know that oftentimes students do have to make choices in what they can afford and what they cannot afford to purchase. And we wanted to reduce or eliminate that dilemma if at all possible. And finally, student success, which is really why we're all here in the first place. We wanted to make sure that by providing the required material to students from day one that everyone was on an even playing field, everyone had the material necessary to succeed. And we've seen that it has paid dividends for our students at NOVA. So, we approached this project by developing faculty workshops and training on open educational resources to help faculty really understand what it meant and how to get from point A to point B. We have resource sites that are geared towards faculty and students, which provide information, links to materials and resources that they can use. A robust collection development program through our library system where we really work to bring in materials that are going to be available for students at no cost to them that are directly related to the courses and the programs that we offer so that we can embed those materials in our courses for students. Maximizing that digital content delivered online is important because we know that students who are taking online courses through NOVA have technology skills and are used to getting material through various multimedia sources. And so, there's not that steep learning curve or jump that they have to make in getting material delivered digitally versus through a standard paper textbook. And all of this was really established to set up our academic program starting with the certificate and then moving into the full associate degree tracks that we do have available currently to students at NOVA. And so, we currently have to develop 25 OER-based courses that are available to students. Students are saving in excess of $200,000 a semester in the textbook costs looking at the courses and the enrollments in those courses versus what they were in the previous versions where textbooks were required. And we chose a broad selection of general education courses so that they would impact potentially every student at the college in some way. So we wanted to make sure that students who had very specific academic programs and needed specific courses that required textbooks and other materials would still be able to benefit by taking some of their general education courses and using open educational resources. And we really do work with our faculty to help them to identify, develop, curate, remix, whatever their needs are around open educational resources. We work to help them with that. And again, saving money by doing away with textbooks also has the added benefit of allowing faculty to not have to work on a publisher's schedule in terms of updating course content around new textbook additions and other types of things. Once the course is developed and they have the materials, then they really have that ownership which is kind of a strange word to use when we're talking about open and sharing material. You know, they really have that control of their courses. And I think that that is important to them. And so I'm not going to go through this whole list, but these are the courses that we currently have available that use open educational resources.  We wanted to make sure that we had a very broad footprint for our faculty and our students to take advantage of. And so the way we launched this program was to provide a small stipend for faculty that came from a grant that we received from our community college system in Virginia to help them develop the new course material and content or pull together the resources that they needed. But certainly the faculty really couldn't do that on their own. And so, you know, we really put together a team that comprised our online librarians, our instructional design team, and we wanted to make sure that, you know, we were working in lockstep towards an end goal of having a course that was going to be a quality course following our same quality matter standards, but not requiring students to purchase textbooks. We also have a shared services distance learning program where we offer online courses that can be taken at 21 of the community colleges in Virginia. And of course we wanted to make sure that these courses were also available as opportunities for other institutions in Virginia to take advantage of and have some of their students participate in these courses as well. And so we chose faculty who we knew were innovative and liked to incorporate technology and digital content in their courses. They understood course design and had worked with our faculty, our instructional designers in the past, and had used library collections, other open content, or had expressed an interest in doing so. And we're really supportive of our end goal because in order to have this project work on the timeline that we had established, we really needed to make sure that the faculty were fully supportive and were going to really roll up their sleeves and work to get the courses completed, and they really did so and have done a phenomenal job. And so these are just some of the resources that our faculty have used. There are many, many other excellent resources out there that aren't on this page, and I just wanted to highlight a few of the sites that we know our faculty used and made or found resources that they incorporated into their courses from these particular sites. There are many, many out there, but these were some that were useful for the faculty in our current program. And this is a listing of the cost of the textbooks and the courses that we redesigned using open educational resources. So you can see the average cost of textbooks was $185, and if the student pursues the OER degree track and takes all of the OER courses in the associate's degree program that we have, they'll save $3,600 over the courses, the course costs for textbooks in those courses. And finally, the outcomes that we have seen. We know that these courses are more affordable because we've seen the cost savings per semester that students have enjoyed. Our success rates have improved in almost all of the OER courses. It's very important that we look at the success rates in these courses. And we have found that having access to all the materials has really helped those students who may not have been able to purchase everything to have what they need to be successful. We are working with Kaleidoscope, with Lumen, for developing some of our campus-based courses to use open educational resources, and those should be launching in the spring. And we want to make them available to other schools, both in the BCCS and sharing our program nationally. We've had a few other schools in our system adopt our model and are working on a general education certificate with open educational resources and several other colleges in Virginia. And we've been recognized for our efforts with a WCET WOW award, which is a nice recognition to say that we have established something that is really benefiting our students in some way. So, thank you. And let me turn it over to my colleague from Maryland. All right. Thank you very much, President. You had a few questions in the chat window, which I'll let you address there over chat, and we'll come back to some of those at the end. Thanks very much for sharing that. Next, I'd like to introduce Dr. Karen Vignari from the University of Maryland University College. I just wanted to say about Karen. And many of you probably know that she was at Michigan State University for many years in developing some amazing OER programs, some in the health area, and otherwise. And correct me if I'm wrong here, Karen, but Karen's only been at University of Maryland University College for just not even a year and a half now. And she brought, I think, open education with her and has made some amazing strides. And I think she's going to tell us this morning about how in just slightly over a year, they have brought OER into OER embedded resources into 50% of their undergraduate courses. So a huge step forward in a very short period of time. And Karen, I'd like to turn it over to you for the details. And yes, it is correct. I was at Michigan State, which was absolutely, yes, go green, yes, Spartans. A great place to work, a lot of innovation. The opportunity to come to UMUC is really about why I think all of you are involved in the community college. This is a pioneering place in adult and distance education. We are really driven to make sure our students can find jobs. And the opportunities here with the leadership that we have have just been amazing. And I happen to walk in at the time the president had already made a commitment. So our goal as of last summer was no cost materials for students. And within that goal, we want to maximize the use of high quality open education resources. Obviously, that also means we're using other types of things. That is, we could be using open access materials. We could be using eBooks. That's not where we want to end up. But our first and foremost goal is to achieve very rapidly no cost materials for students. And then we hope to go back and really do some of the incredible work that I hear Preston talking about as a colleague in the metro area of Washington DC in terms of redesign. And I think that's what Kim will also share, some of the incredible work that they are doing around redesign. So again, this looks very familiar to what Preston had already shared. So I think I'll move ahead. We have created a team approach. Very, very important. Learning Solutions Design Team is working with our library. And they work with our program directors and faculty. As many of you know, and for those who don't know, UMUC uses primarily adjuncts. We have about, depending on the program, 15 to 20% of our staff. And that includes faculty, our full-time, and the rest are adjuncts. But within that full-time staff, we've created a very collaborative process to identify materials, to make sure that we actually clear them, that they can go into our classroom, that they are stored in our content management system. And that curation process has been done very rapidly for us. So our timeline was this fall, 50% of all undergraduate courses to have free, embedded electronic resources. We actually achieved that. And then a little bit some. And our status is we currently have 538 courses out of 745. That means 72% of our stateside undergraduate. TUS stands for the undergraduate school. University of Maryland University College only really has two colleges. And that is the undergraduate school and the graduate school have completed the e-resources. And UNE is correct. This has been a major project for us to undertake. But I don't want to underwrite the kind of work that all of you might undertake. And that is I see some really promising things around redesign with OER. What we did was, I think, also important. But we haven't gotten to some of those hard things around redesign. So by spring of 2015, we should have another 11% complete, which means our target for next year is to have 100% of our undergraduate courses with those no-cost materials. And again, constantly revisiting where we can find open educational resources, as well as by fall 2016 to have 100% of our graduate resources. Now, I do want to make it clear this effort has some funding behind it. I didn't add that into the slide because that's actually in development. So as we're reaching the harder and harder courses to locate appropriate ones, and we're finding that certain things like e-books are not as friendly as we had hoped. We're looking at what courses they create additional problems. We're now going back and looking at what courses we really either need to build resources for, or we need to go deeper to find the appropriate resources. So at this point, I don't have a final dollar amount on what we've spent. And our estimated savings at this point in time is about five million. That's a very conservative kind of calculation. That's based on previous textbook cost, and I believe Preston already shared. But we also believe that only about 40, maybe 50% of our students were actually buying textbooks. So we're trying to keep those in alignment. If we were to just have that simple calculation of what we've replaced, that would go up. And obviously, the savings will be repeated year in and year out. We are trying to work on a public-facing website to kind of share this detail. But Una and I were both at the Open Educational Consortium's international meeting, and we do have a case study that's available through the OEC Open Praxis information. It is dated, so we've gotten further along, but at least then you'll see some of our processes. So right now, our concerns around the curation of resources, and I would assume this is a concern for all of you, this has been a very time-consuming process. And we were doing it at the same time we were replacing our LMS. As we've now replaced our LMS, we're actually looking at what is it we can do better. So we're looking at while we have done this heavy lift of getting to no class, now we have to go back and revisit what I said I'm so admiring about Preston's work, is that they've really gone in with a design approach immediately, where we went in as a replacement of resources approach. And then we are also trying, again, the reason I came to UMUC, such a great place to be right now, is we're trying to transform our learning model. We're trying to figure out personalized tools, adaptive tools. And if we have these kinds of resources for our students, will we even have enough OER right now? And as a community, will we be able to create enough in order to actually have these tools run effectively? And we really do think we have to continually improve this, even though we're meeting our current timelines and schedules. So I saw some questions, but I want to make sure Kim has plenty of time. So I'll go back through the chat window, and then that will allow me to address you in the chat. Kim? All right. Thank you very much, Karen. And if there were some good questions in there, once again, we will. If Karen doesn't have a chance to answer them in the chat, we'll come back to those. Now I want to introduce Kim Fanow, who is the CEO and co-founder of Living Learning, but just a little background. I think I met Kim probably about three years ago, maybe a little bit longer, when the first Next Generation Learning Challenge Grants came out and she was heading up the Kaleidoscope project. And of course, we know that grew into a much bigger effort, which is now Living Learning, and they have gone through multiple phases in terms of OER-based design and development, and the pedagogy that they bring to this process is really compelling. And I think we can all learn a great deal from how they develop their courses, not only to be OER-based, but to be outcomes-driven and just overall to lead to better student learning. So, Kim, please tell us more about that. Thanks so much, Una. And I have a problem always with volume, so if I'm getting too soft, please don't hesitate to let me know that in the chat. Just a quick overview. I thought I might go through just an overview of what we do, who Living Learning is and what we do, and then of course we would love to work with all of you, but I was also trying to pull out kind of what is the element of what we do that even if you aren't working with us, there might be some experience that you can gain from the process that we've been through. We've had the privilege of working with both Karen and Preston in some way, and look forward to doing that again in the future and many of you as well. And I feel like one of the advantages we have working across institutions is that there are some learning cycles that we end up going through, and so I feel like for everything that I can present that we're doing really well, it's from many, many mistakes made along the way and anything I can share that helps you down that path in a more graceful way than we've made our way down that path. I always feel like that's important to do. So, very similar to Preston and to Karen, I feel like it's important to start from a point that, you know, we really focus on improving student success. And I think that open educational resources and the use of data and analytics are really key to being able to do that. I don't believe for most of our students we can separate the ideas of cost and quality and have that actually hang together as an argument. So, we really feel like that improves student success is key, and OER is the processor kind of tools that are approach we bring to that. Our process overall, just to kind of lay our model on the table, so there aren't questions about it, we start by really creating and sharing high quality open courseware that's made from OER. And we view that as courseware is, you know, it needs to be a complete textbook replacement that is bringing together different components to make that possible. Everything that we create ourselves, we license using a Creative Commons attribution license, and we share that out openly. We're also using the work of many others from around the community, and when that carries a different license, then we of course are respecting that license and appreciate the opportunity to partner with and build upon the work of many. When we work directly with institutions, we bring that courseware that we've developed, and we provide hosting and services and support for that to do institutional customizations. And that is all done at a per-enrollment fee. I'll talk a little bit more about what that is in the next slide. And as both of the previous presenters mentioned, that per-enrollment fee is paid by the institution. Most often institutions are putting a small material fee on the course so they're passing that along to students, but it's allowing every student to have access from day one so that all of the students can keep and share and use their learning resources as they move through their education. When I talk about courseware, this is a slide I've borrowed from Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill. We're looking at this kind of yellow circle concept of courseware, which is the content, the open educational resources are really key to what we're delivering, and yet it's also the right technology solution around that that allows that to work well with any LMS that allows that to have the kind of interactivity and effective design that's needed, and then of course that design element instructional design and overall course design to support learning and take advantage of what we're learning about learning through the learning sciences. So we bring all of that together into two models. And our historical model that we've really evolved and focused around is this supported open courseware. And so the cost for that is we are supporting institutions to use that is $5 per enrollment, and that really allows us to have a complete package that we can provide to faculty members that replaces and is comparable in quality to traditional textbook replacement. Newly we've been working with the state of Washington in their competency-based program that's launching in January to develop 18 fully OER-based courses that are competency-based that have adaptive delivery. That's a higher cost, $40 per enrollment. And as with the supported open courseware, Washington is including that as the material free for the course and providing full access to all students that are moving through that program. So those are the two different models that we use. I'm going to spend a little more time on the design process around the supported open courses because I think that's probably what's most replicable by other programs on projects. I will say that the reason for the higher cost in the master courses is the design process around that is a heavy design process and the platform requirements to deliver that are significant and the costs around that are significant to have the adaptive engine and the personalized delivery and all of those components as well. So in our supported open courses we use a standard backward design process this is a look into one of the course templates that we worked through with a group of faculty members. So you'll see column A is where we start which is the outcomes for the course. So one of the things, Una mentioned that there's a tendency for faculty members to cover more content than they really need to or than is included in their outcomes because they're trying to help students get their money's worth from an expensive textbook. And so we're really trying to back away from the traditional table of contents and have faculty members start from the outcomes of the course. Then we talk through with them how are you assessing whether those outcomes have been met and only then do we say what is the best content resource to provide that outcome to achieve that outcome. And the faculty members go through a review you can see kind of across the bottom we give suggestions of where they might start in evaluating content and considering content. I will say it is unusual that we come through this and it is simply a single source. What we are doing most often is remixing based on the faculty's feedback the best collective set of resources and bringing that together in a cohesive way. And so with that we move to our next step which is building master courses. The platform that we're using for building master courses we call it the Candela platform. It looks very familiar to my Canadian friends. BC Campus we've collaborated quite a bit with their team around the platform itself and are using a common technology for this that's really built on WordPress and love working with them. So we built this course that gives the faculty member who's reviewing this a way to look at it that's very consistent and easy and again comparable to a publisher's e-text. We bring text and images into these. We're also able to look at contributions from across our community. So here's an example of a sample discussion forum that we've brought in that if you look towards the bottom you see it's created by Linda Williams of Tidewater Community College in their Z-degree program. And basically the way this is designed, citations is now in our instance been changed to attributions, but you see that little attributions word at the bottom you click on that and it expands to be able to show you what the attribution is in the course. We have what we call an embedded assessments tool. So let's just drop formative assessments in throughout any of the text, add video, have formative assessments around video so that students can test their understanding as they're moving through the courses. So those are really the steps that we go through in creating master courses and then it goes through the quality review. And as Karen mentioned in the chat one of the elements is doing an ADA review of the courses. But there are a bunch of different things that we go through in each of these master courses and do a complete quality check of those. It's a pretty extensive review but that gives you a look into some of the things on that list. And then once we've been through that process we publish those. And most often as we're publishing we do share these out where we've been going through a big kind of technology transition of getting these all built out in the Candela platform. And so we've been a little slow to get them on our public-facing website and have been more focused on the institutions that are using them initially so that we can make sure we go through that pilot and beta process effectively. We create this for each institution so that they have a look into what are the open courses available for the institution. And as we get started working with an institution and that moves us from this master course view into that next step of letting faculty members really go in, roll up their sleeves and make this their own. So that means they move things around. What I see them do most often is delete. It's either deleting entire sections that aren't covered in their outcomes or it is thinning the content so that they can really focus the learners on the materials that are most important. So this shows how you would move things around and adjust what's in the sections and then the faculty members can also click in and do that kind of work-level editing. If you're familiar with WordPress, this is going to look very familiar to you because that's actually the underlying technology of that. So in our design goals for these supported open courses, what we're really trying to do is to create something that is almost as easy as really one-click adoption for faculty members that are really willing to make this change and do something to better support student learning and yet they just are not going to build from scratch. We do see, my point number two, this kind of difference in archetypes amongst faculty members with which we work. There are builders, there are adapters, there are adopters. And we've also really tried with this to create something that a builder can look at what's here and say, excellent, I understand what's been done, I get what's happening, I'm starting from scratch and building my own course or writing my own set of materials that can support that range of use cases. The fully enabling all five Rs, honestly our driver to pull this out of an LMS, we have been building courses, we have built open courses in seven different LMSs and have some strong preferences through that process, but what we found is that we were trying to use the LMS as a content management system and we're not designed for that, they do not do it well. They do not allow us to continue to do the kind of remixing and revision and redistribution that needs to happen. And we also feel like it's really important that we have a platform and approach that allows a remix of materials and then students or faculty members to be able to do a PDF export or an EPUB export that gives a consistent look and feel to the materials that have been remixed and allows students to retain that and carry that forward and not lose that at the end of the course when the LMS course closes down and they need to go back and reference those materials. And then finally being able to really do the kind of data-driven enhancement to the courses. So that's the quick overview of the design process that we use for the supported open courses. I'll do a really quick run through some of what we're doing with these adaptive courses that we're calling mastery-based courses and then also kind of note what's next with those as we move ahead. Our design goals with the mastery courses are very different. We are really using OER to say, can we really take advantage of the full power of personalized learning in a more cost-effective way than what we're seeing happening. When we look at the collective cost of just to call out, a Pearson textbook with the Pearson's My Math Lab adding the Newton capability on top of that, we are getting to a price point that is exceptionally high for what's likely a developmental math course that a student might have to take a couple of times. So really trying to keep that cost low. The one-size-fits-one approach, how can we really use the freedom of OER to have more derivative works and youth learning data to meet the needs of every learner? We're trying to keep as much revision capability as we can but still taking advantage of learning science-driven design. So that's a balance. And then the last one is we're trying to make sure that even though when we are building in an adaptive platform that it's really going to require kind of a pay-to-use kind of process for institutions but that we're still making sure that all of the assets that we're creating can be pushed back out into the commons with a CC-by-license so that other people can use them and build on them and improve them and we can continue to have that sense of community. So this is the design process. It's in the slides. I want to make sure there's time for presentation and questions with everyone so I'm just going to kind of gloss over this and say, you know, we're really looking to how can we take some of the historical challenges in the research data around competency-based learning, bring those forward, address them in an instructional design approach that brings in more relevance, more context and more ability for students to synthesize complex concepts. So this is what it begins to look like. The mastery design, I mentioned one of the design criteria is it's competency-based and so this is a look into the microeconomics course with a set of competencies that kind of scroll down lower but that gives you a view of how that looks and the students see their progress through each of the competencies in those graphics. The relevance, and this is really a mock-up so you'll see the lorem it's some content in there that is how can we take each of these competencies and give students a view into how someone in the real world uses this concept and is able to take care of that. Then the diagnostics. So if you look in this top right-hand corner we have a show what you know area where the first thing the students are able to do is go in, if they have prior work experience, if they have military experience, they have an opportunity to actually kind of show what they know in the course and communicate through some of the components. And then finally this ability to drill down in terms of the context to be able to see what are the sub-components that make up each of these and then bring them back together and show that the students can do some assessments through this process or get some feedback through the process in their ability to combine complex concepts. So we're trying to move to a situation where we have students gaining mastery in eggs, butter, flour, vanilla that they actually have the ability to bake a cake and demonstrate mastery in cake baking. So this kind of pulling it all together is that focus on being able to bring those together. So I want to make sure that I leave time for questions. I'm just looking at the chat and let me answer one thing quickly. Historically as we've been trying to create some tool sets that can be used across LMS is we have built in Canvas and our idea with Canvas that we thought was just genius and a great breakthrough is that we would build in Canvas and then we would have common cartridge exports that anyone could use and implement in any LMS. And I would say that has worked badly. So it's one of our lessons learned is that part of our focus and investment in really moving toward the platform that externalizes the content is it does allow us to have all of that working in a system where it's presented in a way that students can follow that through in a cohesive way that works well. And then we use LTI to plug that into any LMS so that it works with any LMS and isn't really constrained by what our initial build system was. So that seems to be working much better than what we had done in the past which was quite painful. All right. So with that, I actually left Nate's contact information here just because Nate is a great source for follow-up and quite often more responsive than I am. So I wanted to make sure his information for follow-up. All right. Well, thank you, Kim. Great information and lots of questions. Before we go into our official Q&A and thank you to all of our speakers for keeping your comments within our time limit so we do have some time for Q&A. I just wanted to mention that our next webinar, our November webinar will be Wednesday, November 12th. And it will be on open pedagogies. And it will be featuring faculty and students from colleges. And we have two confirmed groups. We might have another one. One from college of the canyons in California and one from Tacoma in Washington state. And now I'd like to go to questions. And I just want to recapture a couple of the questions which have floated around and then we'll be open to the new ones here. And once again, we do have emails here in case we miss yours inadvertently. I know that there were some early questions in the chat window about incentivizing faculty. I think these were originally addressed to Preston and Karen. And did you want to just recap that quickly, Preston? What kind of incentives do you offer faculty to participate? Sure. We offered a small stipend in the beginning to help to compensate faculty for their time and to incentivize the move from using a textbook as the foundation of the course for students to moving away from that to free digital and open educational resources. That was, I mean, the stipend was relatively small. What we did was we made sure that we had the services to support faculty in addition to that with our instructional design team, with our librarians and with other folks so that it was a partnership and the faculty were not sort of floundering to try to put something together themselves, but really had the support to make it happen in a relatively short time frame. Thank you for that, Preston. Yeah, and that addresses a couple of other questions that came up around how do you help faculty to find those materials? And so you use both librarians, which of course are search experts and curators and also instructional designers which helped with making the course, which I think was really critical. There was a question that came about resistance from faculty. And Karen, I think that one was directed at you. Were there faculty who were reluctant to engage in these OER-based courses, either developing them or teaching them? Yeah, and I did try to answer that in the chat, but let me just summarize. Again, we are a different kind of institution. We offer basically model courses. And yes, some of our courses are taught by very small groups and for small groups, but generally many of our courses see anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 enrollments a year. And as such, getting people to participate is a little bit of a different process. So yeah, we've had faculty reluctance, and some of it's for good reason. Some books come with software that students can then manipulate. So some of those issues we're still trying to grapple around. Faculty do not disagree with the idea of lowering costs for students. So that's really the focus that we maintain while we try to work through the process. Alternately at UMUC, that trumps everything. So faculty do not have the right not to use the model course. So they have to use what it is that is given to them. They can add new materials, but they can't ask for a student to buy a book. So again, because of our model, we're a little bit different. So I'm not sure what I can advise the rest of you about getting faculty participation. OK, well, thanks for that, Karen. Yeah, it is an interesting model. And I think, Kim, I don't want to speak for you, but I think that you let colleges choose the faculty that are going to participate with Lumen Learning. So you're less involved in that piece, I assume. Yes, we are. My experience across institutions is very similar to both Karen and Preston have said, though, in terms of the idea that we see generally one of two models. One which is kind of seeking interest from faculty members and using those as the initial faculty members and then seeing real success with those first faculty members advocating with their peers. The number one complaint and concern from faculty members is this is going to take too much time. And a faculty member who's already been through the process, who can share with a peer what they have done and help them see that there's not a lot of time required to take advantage of the work that's already been done really helps with that process. And in other cases, the institution is really driving it from a departmental level, and that is especially in institutions that have a very high number of adjuncts or heavy turnover amongst the adjunct population. And that's something we see more commonly. Okay, well, thank you for that. So this question is also about digital formats and printing. I think Karen, some of that may have been addressed to you initially. Did you want to speak a little bit about the printing capability digital formats and obviously ADA comes into play? And I think probably all three of you have something to say on this one. Yeah, I do want to say that, again, remember our promise, our goal was no cost materials. And while we want to be quote unquote a good citizen in OER, that meant we chose some e-books, e-text, because we had access to them. We're hoping to redo them, but we have found that our e-text really in a highway just simply repeat what we used to do with the old textbook, right? They're not integrated. So that's a bigger issue. But also the issue around certain e-text is really going through and for our Canadian friends, the American for Disabilities and the 508 compliance rules, I saw that UBC has already a great set of practices. But this issue is harder where faculty are creating their own courses without help from other people. So in our process, we do this as a team. And so anything that has been brought in by UMUC has actually gone through a cleared process. The problem is when the adjunct faculty who means well brings in an additional open resource that actually hasn't been gone through an ADA. I think unfortunately for many of you on this call, this is going to be a much larger issue. How you're going to work through clearance when you're very faculty-centric, and that is you're allowing them to create that course. Okay. Thank you, Karen. And so Preston, you have an instructional designer work with your faculty on developing the course. Does that help with addressing the issue of accessibility and support for students with disabilities? Yes, we definitely try to address that. And we're really making a systematic effort to make sure that that is something that we are doing when we are revising courses. But we're also going back and making sure that courses that were revised or developed previously are addressing those issues. And Maureen is here on the participating in the webinar today is an instructional designer at NOVA who is basically leading a project to make sure that we're going back and looking at our courses and making sure that we have captions and we have transcripts and other types of things available where necessary. And while at the same time our instructional development process incorporates that in future development for courses. Okay. Well, thank you. That is great to hear. Kim, I want to change the topic just a little bit since we're running out of time here. And there was a lot of questions and you may have answered those. You and Nate may have answered those in the chat window now. But just your developing your course is now using the Candela system, which I think is somewhat LMS agnostic. It can be apparently things can be moved exported in and out. Do you have a requirement for your courses that the materials are principle or does that vary from course to course? What sort of standards do you have around access and accessibility? Well, it was one of the drivers around the kind of externalizing this from the LMS. So there is a capability in the platform that I can, I want to say it's one click, but it's not. It's about three clicks to be able to create a complete PDF export of all of the materials in the course. And so, you know, it's really useful because, you know, there was a question on the list serve around printing boundless materials or printing, you know, if you're trying to remix a number of different OER based materials or openly licensed materials, it's really difficult to have them come together, you know, digitally to start with in a way that feels cohesive, but even more so if you're trying to create a print version. And so it gives us a way that, you know, you can go in and say, I want an export of this course that is a PDF or an E-Pub or a Moply version that gives the student the ability to have a print option. Now, often the institution is saying we're going to work with our bookstore and our print center to have a print option available for students using the same kind of transactional process. And I love that because ideally this is all creating more options. And what we want to see happen is every student has access to their course materials from day one, but if that digital access that I have on day one isn't meeting my needs, I'm going to go into the bookstore and I get a print version or wherever that's being delivered. And so, you know, that's part of what I think we're all working towards across the many different projects is to make sure that every option is available that's going to best support student learning. All right. Well, thank you, Kim. That was very helpful that you have that PDF option built in. And of course, individual institutions, they provide that at their own discretion through their bookstore. That's another interesting approach. Well, I want to thank all of our audience and the great questions we got this morning. And of course, our three wonderful presenters. Once again, I'm sorry if we couldn't answer all of your questions during this presentation, but we do have those emails there, please do follow up with us. And once again, the archive for this will be posted early next week on the OER Consortium site. So thanks once again and hope to see you next month on November 12th. And round of applause for our presenters. Amazing job. Thank you.


Sexting is just something. It seems like we all do now, but not everyone does, and we need to pay attention to the reality that is going on around us. Here is a true story of a girl who had been bullied over a sex message she sent. She was secretly cutting herself, and eventually she ended her life. What you are about to hear is a real news report written by Andrew Meacham. This happened here in the Tampa Bay area in 2009. At the end of the school year of middle school, the taunting became so bad that the bullied victims' friends surrounded her between classes.  A few days before the victim had forwarded a new photo of herself to a boy she liked. The image found its way to other students who showed it to their friends. Soon the nude photo was circulated through cell phones at both the local middle school and high school. She'd walk into class and somebody would say, oh, here comes the slut, a friend that a bullied victim said. She certainly did not lend anything on that something was wrong, said the victim's father. She never really said anything to us. She wrote in her journal, I'm done for sure now. I can feel it in my stomach. I'm going to try and strangle myself. I hope it works. A few minutes after 10pm, her mother checked in on her to see if she wanted to come downstairs and watch television with them. The victim declined. About an hour later, the victim's mother eased open her daughter's door to say goodnight. She saw her daughter standing a few feet away.  Then she saw that a pink scarf was knotted around the canopy of her queen-sized bed. The other end was wrapped around her daughter's neck. An ambulance arrived and took the victim to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead. The medical examiner's office ruled the victim's death a suicide. The doctors who examined her body found a zone of shallow cuts up to an inch or so long on her right thigh. The purpose of this reading is to show that what we were talking about has devastating results. The fact is there are some things in life we will never be able to delete. So starting now, we need to delete before we hit send. Delete? The idea that it's just flirting. Delete the idea that the image will just stay with one person. We need to delete the idea that just one picture can't hurt. Delete the idea that we can handle these types of consequences.


The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by stark racial and ethnic disparities in both incidents and mortality. These disparities have been attributed to structural factors such as socio-economic status, housing conditions, and access to health care. In Illinois, Black and Hispanic Latinx populations had higher rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths than their white peers, even when controlling for age and geographic location. Additionally, the majority of these disparities were due to differences in incidents rather than case fatality ratio. Therefore, it is important to consider structural factors in order to reduce these disparities and improve population health. This article was authored by Tobias M. Holden, Melissa A. Simon, Damon T. Arnold, and others.


Thanks for clicking play. I promise you that this one is really cool. At least I can promise you that I think this one is very cool. This guy's name is Rashid Khan. He's a bowler for Afghanistan. He's really good. He's got a couple different balls. This one goes right, then it cuts left. Here we go. This one goes right, then it cuts left. And this one cuts in or stays true. So that's the secrets he can use. And that one went right to left. Or in cricket, they referenced the batsman. So that would be offspin. And it went away from him, the offside. And he just plays it. He doesn't run. So he stays up. And now he dices him up the other way. Oh, no. He beat him. He beat him. But he just edged it. And when he edged it, it hit him in the leg. And it didn't hit the wickets. And they weren't able to catch it. But you want to hit it in the middle. And he got him. So that went left to right, or leg spin. And that's what he's trying to do. So now he's got to start the sequence over. And he's like, OK, back to this way. That one's going away from him. They hold him for a single. He says, thank you. Good job. He's going to double it up. And he beats him a little bit again there. But they don't get it. Look, that one, it cuts to the left. And he's got his line. He's protecting the stumps, the wicket. Because if the ball hits that, he's out. But also, if that ball catches the edge of his bat, and then the keeper catches it, he's out. So that one moved more than he was anticipating. It went right to left to offspin. And they just almost got him. So now, oh wait. He says, hey, hey, something's blocking my vision. He says, well, I was going to bowl this one. So you're lucky. That's what I was going to do. And they're smiling. And he's like, oh, it's OK. Someone's blocking my vision. Last ball of the over. He switches it up again and gets him. Right through, top of middle stump, he's out. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I got you. I'm the best. I'm Rashid Khan. The fans are cheering for him. Cheers for Rashid Khan. Now watch this as where it gets really fun. This is what I was able to do to show you guys what's happening. This was the fifth of the over, the one that he almost got out on. Just almost edged it. And look where his bat was. And look where the ball was. So that's where his bat was. And then the ball's a little bit off of it. Now the next ball happens.  He almost got me there. I got to move my bat over to protect from that ball. And see where his bat now? It's right in line with the yellow ball. That was the previous ball. But Rashid Khan throws the wrong end, throws the one that goes the other way, completely tricks him. So he's more extended. He's trying to protect from that ball that he almost just got out on the yellow one. You can see his bat's in line. He had made the adjustment. But Khan made the other adjustment and says, nah, dude. I'm coming inside now and gets him. And he's out and he's done. And this is how both deliveries look when you overlay them. They're very similar. How are you supposed to know which ball is which? Just like baseball, you got to pick it up by the spin. And then also the spin is gnarly because I don't know how you do that with your hand to the other way of your body. But you can see on the left is the one that's going to bounce and go offside. And you can see the last pressure point is his pointer finger on the seam. And he's spinning it. Now on the right is the wrong end or the googly. And his thumb is still there. And his thumb is really going to help flick that to keep it straight and overpower or balance out his pointer finger. But very similar in arm action, very different in grip and spin. Like very different. Look at the grip is way different. And the thumb is more involved. And the other one, it's just the pointer finger way more involved. But the coolest thing about this is if you rewind and go to the ball when the batsman was like, hey, there's something in my vision. Can you stop? And he's saying, okay, well, I was going to throw this. I was going to throw this. You can see his grip and it's actually his stock delivery or the one that goes away from the batter. See how his thumb is tucked? Well, that's not the wrong end. When he's throwing the wrong end on the right, his thumb is out when he's throwing the other one. So that dude was going to play the correct shot and play the turn and block it. But he was like, hold on, something's blocking me. And Rashid in that time goes, okay, fine. He goes, actually, never mind. I think I'm going to throw the wrong and I got you set up for this and throws it that way. So he screwed himself by saying, time out, time out. And that's why he's saying, ah ha, ha, ha, ha. You played yourself. High five.


Welcome to a new Project Camp video. So in this video series we usually go out there to visit the community and learn from their experiences and just research on what could be done and could be improved. Except this time we're going to do it slightly different because we're not going to go out there but we're going to visit our own community which he set up in the last year when we developed a new version for precious plastic. So it's based in the Netherlands in a city called Eindhoven and we started about a year ago in this old empty building. It's right in the middle of the city, like really right in the middle. And before it was an old car garage and then it's been empty for a long time. So we transformed it into our workspace. We wanted to make a new version of precious plastic. We didn't plan a community, we just invited people to work. But yeah, they needed to sleep or can eat. So we had to figure this all out. What time do we have dinner? How do we sleep? How do we chill? Where do we shower? Everything. So we learn a lot about this whole process and it's been a very good test run for Project CAM. So let me show you all the things we've learned. Hey, welcome to the workspace. Here is where we've been working for the past years. We've like designers, engineers, developers, architects, chefs, coordinators. And these are people that come from all over the world. They come from different cultures with different expertise, different expectations. And they all here for one reason because we all care about the environment. And here particularly we work on plastic to develop solutions to the plastic problem. And that's one thing that we all share is that we know the world is kind of fucked, but we also know that there are a lot of solutions that can be developed to fix all of these big problems that we are facing. And moving forward here, we have the studio where we develop all the digital solutions to help people tackle this problem. There's a vegan kitchen that feeds us every day with incredible food. And over there is the workspace where we develop all the machines and tools for people to use around the world. And Jan is going to show you all the magic that happens in there every single day. Hey, so we're in the workspace. As you can hear, very noisy. And also messy place, particularly I was close to deadlines. But I will make you like a quick tour. So here we are in the metal working area when we will have all our metal stock, drill press, grinders, milling machine, lathe, chop saw. Everything needed to work with metal. And on the other side of the workspace, we have more our woodworking area. And then in the middle, the center of the workspace where we keep all our tools. So how does it work? So we start every morning at 10 by a quick meeting that lasts from 10 to 20 minutes. And basically we use this meeting to coordinate ourselves. It can be to coordinate ourselves for using the machines, for going to buy some stuff, for using the van, to go to scrap yard or to go to metal shop or anything. So everyone in the workspace have a particular project. And every week we meet all together to discuss our previous week goals and next week's goals. But recently we talked more about that. At the beginning of the year we created this wall to write down the goals, the individual goals that each person is working and have to achieve. So for instance we have the weekly goals, the monthly goals and the long-term goals to help keep an overview of what everybody is working on. And we are every Monday morning we divide ourselves in the product design team, the workspace area and the studio area. And we discuss the objectives of the weeks, is they are feasible, how are we going to make them, if it's realistic or if not. And that's pretty much about the tool. Hi, I'm Kat. When we arrived here, there was nothing here and things first had to be set up and people started working and more and more people started coming and working with a lot of people together easily gets messy as well. So together we came up with some ways how to make that working together easier and better. Let me just show you some of that. So this is our schedule. We started 9 with breakfast and 10 with work and then have lunch and dinner, snack and dinner. And that's just for everyone to know roughly when to be here for what. Then we have cleaning teams. So everyone is in one cleaning team and has one day a week. So I am in the monkey team, I am cleaning on Friday. Here we can always see our current team. We have 48 people, that's a lot. And then we have our calendar which gives us the overview of when are people leaving and coming and whose birthday it is. And then with so many people you easily lose the overview of who is actually working on what and responsible for what. So we made an overview of who is working in which area like digital communication machines, kitchen, food, product design. So people know who to ask and where they are working on. And to keep everything a bit clean we have every evening at 7, clean up time. So we ring this bell and we shout clean up time! So this is the daily stuff. And as we are still very much in progress of figuring out how to work together in a good way and things might not always run very smoothly we also have a weekly come together and a monthly community day where people can complain and give suggestions and just bring the wonderful and weird ideas how we can make things better. And this is all the work related stuff we do in here to stay productive but we also need to sleep and eat. So let me show you how that's done and first we go into the kitchen. We are in a precious plastic kitchen. I'm Cathy. I'm Aghi. And we are cooking here for over 50 people every day twice. Lunch and dinner. Yeah, some days more. Yeah. We cook vegan food. We getting our food from the market and we also ordering our food in a box. Huge amount. Okay, so we have everything really huge because we have a lot of people here. We are eating together twice. Dinner is happening outside right now. That's all our team. Thank you, Jerry. And what's the food people love the most? Peanut butter. Peanut butter. That's a huge peanut butter fight. What are people like the least? Cleaning up after open day potatoes. Huge complaints. Hi, I'm Sarah. And I'm going to show you today where we're living. We have ten houses in the north of Eindhoven. Ten minutes cycling from the workspace. We can, we live, this guy lives with us. We live in this neighbor. We got ten houses here, one in this square. And we got one van, two, three, four vans. I'm going to show you inside. This room, it's built, building. It was a big living room. Papal decided to live in the living room. So he built it. And it's linked to the kitchen. And we got Nico. This house has got Wi-Fi. It's the only one. So all the people come here to work during the week because the work space is too loud and crazy. So people can relax, have a lot of tea because the name of this house is tea house. So you can come, choose your tea, boiling and make it. And we got... She lives in the garden room. With this guy. The house, the house. So we go. We made our garden. Nico made the tomato field. And we got the pumpkins. I don't know how, but we have pumpkins. And we got people sleeping in the garden room. Like Julie. She built it. It's a little bit. She just eased it a little bit. And she has a small heater, I think. And she got the vacuum cleaner. This is a rare piece of the houses. It's the only one that we have. So people have to share. We have a channel for that. What is the vacuum cleaner? And also, Glicerio also has it. For cleaning the house. And we just, we got one. And then we can go through the hall. This was locked. But Paco need the Wi-Fi. So he take it off. So now the tea house is linked. To all the other house. And if you see this sign. It means he's us. So you can just open the door. Walk in. And welcome to Kevin. He's a Jesun. Sleeping there. Good morning.  And then we got Jesun stuff. Under the rain. We got an amazing garden. And this is the most inspiring house. The first rules are Kevin. You have to draw on the wall. So this is almost one year of painting. And we used to do cinema. This. But now we change in marshmallow. So now we're here. And yeah. We got Kevin. And plus his recycle. It's so cool. It's pretty. You don't talk about washing machine. You don't talk about the washing machine. You don't talk about it. We don't know who write that. So here's Sarah from the Netherlands.  And yeah, our house in like two months. They're gonna become like this. Or how else ten houses. And we gotta be homeless. So pay in patron. Give us two thousand some more. So we're gonna have a new house. And it was amazing being these houses. The neighborhood is amazing. And it's raining here. So I gotta back to the workspace. See you soon. All right. So that's basically the current infrastructure we set up. How we live, work and eat together. And over the year we learned quite a few things. And I wrote them down on my hand. So I don't forget. The first thing I would say it's been quite intense. Living and working with the same people in the same space. For one year long it's just, yeah, required quite some mental energy. And you really need to make sure you have time for yourself. Bulk food. I really like bulk food. It's hard for me to go back to individual food. Because it requires much more packaging. It's much more expensive. And in bulk's amount you can really buy straight from the farmer. So big fan of bulk food. Shared bikes. Originally we wanted to have a few bicycles that people could share. Didn't work at all. Bicycles were always broken. No one took responsibility. So we ended up that everyone just has their own bike. We didn't have an HR manager or something like that. Which you would usually find in a company to make sure everyone stays happy. So we were really lucky that we had a group of very flexible people that figured it out themselves. Made sure if there are problems that they would bring it up. So yeah, I would say that's not always the case that it would work out like that. But I think we've been lucky with that one. Deadline. So we had quite a tight one because we had one year to develop fresh plastic version 4. So towards the end it became much more intense and we really needed to get our stuff done. Which is not necessarily nice. It really becomes a very much work focused environment. And in the beginning it was a bit more community oriented as well. So I would say next time maybe less tight of a deadline. Now these are a few points that I personally learned during this time. But I also gathered a few feedback from members here in the community.  Intense as strawberry with salt and sugar. A lot of challenges from the food to the intense way of living. Sometimes I mean what might have been difficult would have been getting some alone time. I would say privacy. I think after a while it's really intense. We live in this kind of bubble and we always see the same people and we have the same schedule. So especially at the weekends if I could I didn't come here in the workspace. I had long walks just like alone and in silence. So by the end of the weeks I appreciated silence really a lot. Yeah sometimes it could be hard. Or like when there is a lot of meeting or community meeting and you're just like...  Like who cleaned up what? Why do I always have to clean up the onesaw and why does maintenance of machines and stuff like this. Trying to find that balance between creating a system that works for everyone while still catering to the individual needs of particular people and what time do you work best, what time do you like to eat who doesn't want to clean up at this time who would rather go home at that time. I also miss home and that kind of part I think. Teams works. Another sarcastic way of talking. People basically. Being pung. I really love to eat all the meals with a lot of people. Being part of something that feels more meaningful. Certainly this kind of sense of anything is possible and we can make a big difference here. Making sure we clean up at the end of the day. It's kind of an activity. I think that's the most community based day is like the one day we have to clean. Yeah for me like when I arrived what I was really surprised about it was like the power of co-creation. When we made progress I really liked that. So when we solved the problem. Being able to work with common-minded people was a common goal. And then also existing within that group the same group of people I think is really beneficial to I guess the development of a project. We were a lot of people that have a lot of things in common so maybe also that makes us like connect with each other very well. That eventually they have to become friends. There's like no way around becoming friends. I love living in a community and I actually can't really imagine myself going back and just owning a whole apartment in my own and yeah going back to how it was before.